Exile is a series of role-playing video games created by Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software. They were released as shareware titles for Macintosh and Windows systems. Exile III was also ported to Linux by a third party. There were four games released in the series. All of the games were later revived in the Avernum series. Common to all games in the Exile series are 2D graphics and basic sound. The graphics in the first versions of Exile I and II had simple textures, colours and outlines, which were then replaced in later versions with Exile III's graphics. The games are designed to be non-linear and long in gameplay length.
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines freeware unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the freeware it offers. For instance, modification, redistribution by third parties, and reverse engineering are permitted by some publishers but prohibited by others. Unlike with free and open-source software, which are also often distributed free of charge, the source code for freeware is typically not made available. Freeware may be intended to benefit its producer by, for example, encouraging sales of a more capable version, as in the freemium and shareware business models.
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software under the GNU General Public License. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain and the standard compiler for most projects related to GNU and the Linux kernel. With roughly 15 million lines of code in 2019, GCC is one of the biggest free programs in existence. It has played an important role in the growth of free software, as both a tool and an example.
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse, contain the necessary compiler, interpreter, or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and Lazarus, do not.
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website or on a compact disc included with a magazine. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.
Escape Velocity is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat video game series first introduced in 1996 by Ambrosia Software for the Apple Macintosh. Two other similar games based on the original, EV Override and EV Nova, followed in 1998 and 2002 respectively, the latter of which is also available on Microsoft Windows. In addition there is a trading card game available based on the storyline of the EV Nova universe.
Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
Escape Velocity Nova is a video game developed by Ambrosia Software in collaboration with ATMOS. It is the third game in the Escape Velocity series of space trading and combat games. It was released on March 19, 2002 for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, and later ported to Windows and released on July 11, 2003. The game's premise, set in a time period after mankind has discovered hyperspace technology, grants the player freedom to take missions, trade goods, steal from other ships, and enter one of six storylines.
Ambrosia Software was a predominantly Macintosh software company founded in 1993 and located in Rochester, New York, U.S. Ambrosia Software was best known for its Macintosh remakes of older arcade games, which began with a 1992 version of Atari, Inc.'s Asteroids from 1979. The company also published utility software. Its products were distributed as shareware; demo versions could be downloaded and used for up to 30 days. Later the company released some products for iOS. Ambrosia's best-selling program was the utility Snapz Pro X, according to a 2002 interview with company president Andrew Welch.
Maelstrom is a video game developed by Andrew Welch, released as shareware in November 1992 for Mac OS. The game is an enhanced clone of Atari, Inc.'s 1979 Asteroids arcade game with a visual style similar to the Atari Games 1987 sequel, Blasteroids. Maelstrom was released when there were few action games for the high-resolution color displays of the Macintosh, so it garnered much interest, despite the dated concept, and led to the creation of Ambrosia Software.
Glider is a Macintosh video game written by John Calhoun and first published as shareware in 1988 under the company name Soft Dorothy Software. The object of the game is to fly a paper plane through the rooms of a house. Air currents from heat ducts and fans affect the plane's movement, while assorted household objects are usually deadly. Some rooms have special mechanics, such as the ability to slide along grease-covered surfaces. Each room is presented as a two-dimensional side view.
Apeiron is a Macintosh game developed and released as shareware by Ambrosia Software. An adaptation of the 1980 arcade game Centipede, it was first released on February 11, 1995. In November 2004, a Mac OS X port was made available.
MilkDrop is a hardware-accelerated music visualization plugin for Winamp and Kodi, which was originally developed by Ryan Geiss in 2001. It uses DirectX and intelligent beat detection to render iterated images which blend seamlessly. MilkDrop uses a complex system of interpolation to transition between presets gradually through time, creating a constantly changing visual experience.
Avara is a 1996 first-person shooter written by Juri Munkki for Macintosh and published by Ambrosia Software. A fast 3D engine, integrated Internet play, and easy level editing were notable features at the time of its release. While not commercially successful, the game found a cult following. Munkki publicly released the source code in 2016, the game's 20th anniversary.
Realmz is a fantasy adventure and role-playing video game first developed and published by Fantasoft in 1994 for the Apple Macintosh as shareware. Fantasoft released a Microsoft Windows-compatible version in 1999, and a science fiction role-playing game based on the Realmz engine, titled New Centurions, in 2001. Realmz was originally written by Tim Phillips on a Macintosh IIsi; he also wrote four game scenarios, including the introductory scenario "City of Bywater". Other original scenario contributors were Jim Foley and Sean Sayrs.
Aptana, Inc. is a company that makes web application development tools for use with a variety of programming languages. Aptana's main products include Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer.
Xsnow is a software application that creates the appearance of snow falling on the elements of the graphical user interface of a computer system. Xsnow was originally created as a virtual greeting card for Macintosh systems in 1984. In 1993, the concept was ported to the X Window System as Xsnow, and was included on a number of Linux distributions in the late 1990s.
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
Software categories are groups of software. They allow software to be understood in terms of those categories, instead of the particularities of each package. Different classification schemes consider different aspects of software.
