mWaba Demo Programs Download Page

mWaba Demos Download Page

NEW! For Waba Beta 9 – November 1999

The mWaba toolkit and associated demos have been updated for Waba Beta 9. The mWabaDemo and Solitaire demo have also been combined into one downloadable file for each platform. The new toolkit is now NOT compatible with previous versions of Waba.

Palm Users

Although the code in these demos are compatible with Waba VMs for Palm devices, these devices cannot provide sufficient heap storage to run these demos. I would have to say that the toolkit itself will only be suitable for WinCE systems, since they will take up a good bit of resources while they are running, and even if they did fit on a Palm device, it would leave very little room for any medium-sized to large application to run. I would therefore advise that palm users stick to the native Waba GUI and the Waba Extras provided by Rob Nielsen which you can get from the Top 10 download list at www.wabasoft.com

Notes and Disclaimers

Firstly, the demos are hefty because they use every available control in the toolkit (something which an actual application may not do). They both also require a fair amount of memory when running, so WinCE users are advised to close any other running programs before running them otherwise its performance will be severely impaired or it may not run at all. Also for WinCE users, I would advise you disconnect the device from the host computer before running the demos; occasionally the connection can severely slow down the system.

I would guess that most people who will be downloading these demos will have the Waba SDK installed, in which case I strongly advise that you download and run the Java version of these demos first so you can decide if you want to install it on your target device. There are a few differences in the behaviour of the demos when running it on Java which you should note:

The fonts are different, although the font metrics system works correctly.
The Java system does not support DRAW_OR or DRAW_AND so when drawing images it is not possible to make portions of images transparent. This is evident when playing Solitaire under Java. As you drag the marbles around you will notice the square around the marbles covering the other marbles. This is effect is not present when running under WinCE and (hopefully) Palm so the marbles appear perfectly circular on these systems.
Of course, the Java systems works much faster than the WinCE or (I would guess) Palm systems.

Lastly, I have provided source code to the demos, but not to the toolkit itself yet. I am working on documenting a users guide to the toolkit and hope to have this available as soon as I can. You can find what documentation I do have here. I will be happy to answer short questions and accept any comments you may have though (especially from Palm users), please do so by e-mailing me at michael_brereton@hotmail.com

mWabaDemo and Solitaire

This program demonstrates all of the available controls, containers and windows available in the mWaba package, except for the InteractivePanel container. This is demonstrated in the Solitaire program also available for download from this page. A walkthrough of the demo is available and I would advise that you read and save this walkthrough as it details features of the demo that you may otherwise miss. The files are:

The WinCE version should be unzipped and the two warp files mWaba and mWabaDemo.wrp file must be placed in a folder called mWaba under the Program Files directory. The mWabaDemo.lnk and Solitaire.lnk files should be placed in a folder accessible from the Start Menu.

The Java version should be unzipped to a folder called (say) mWabaDemo. To run mWabaDemo, cd into the directory and enter:

java -cp .\;<the Waba SDK directory> waba.applet.Applet mWabaDemo

To run Solitaire cd into the same directory and enter:

java -cp .\;<the Waba SDK directory> waba.applet.Applet solitaire.Solitaire

For example, on my system the Waba SDK directory (which contains the waba directory containing all the waba classes) is c:\html\wince. So my command line is:

java -cp .\;c:\html\wince waba.applet.Applet mWabaDemo

For those of you not familiar with this version of the game of solitaire, the object of the game to eliminate marbles by jumping them one over the other. Jumping one marble over another removes the marble jumped over. Only one marble may be jumped at a time and the object is to end up with only one marble on the board. I wish you luck! I still haven't managed to do it! To make it a little more playable I have included a Compose mode (accessible via the Game menu). Switching to Compose mode will allow you to add or remove marbles by clicking on them. You can then make up your own (smaller) board and and then switch back to Play mode to play. This a good way to practice, working your way up to a full board.