Pro-SiMPLE's Construction Kits

A  "construction kit" provides you with a convenient way of adding specialized third-party tasks to your system. You are probably already familiar with one such set of tasks from your previous experiences with the pre-installed "@toys" tasks. (In fact we sometimes refer to those tasks as being the "Toys construction kit".)

There are several other Pro-SiMPLE construction kits ("Pro-Kits") that are currently available. But they have not been preinstalled and most of them are quite old (i.e, they were created back in the days when every computer had a built-in floppy disk drive). Consequently, the documentation for installing and using those construction kits (which can be found in Part 3 of SiMPLE's built-in tutorial) is somewhat outdated (since it focuses on importing kits from floppy disks).

But here is the essence of what you need to know about the Pro-Kits:

1 - There are six Pro-Kits that are available off-line (and a newer Space War kit* that is available on-line). When you downloaded SiMPLE, the six off-line kits came along in a folder called KITS located in the main SiMPLE folder. Those six Pro-Kits are: "Blockout", "Crypto", "Lander", "Mazekit", "Minekit", and "Quakes".

2 - All of the Pro-Kits (except for Space War) are intended for use with Pro-SiMPLE's command-line mode only. (Ultra-SiMPLE and "Drag & Drop" mode weren't even around back in those days. )

3 - To install one of the six older Pro-kits (such as the "Quakes" kit), first create a new Project (e.g., type GO QUAKES on the command line). Then type the word IMPORT followed by the path to the desired kit (e.g.,  IMPORT   \SIMPLE\KITS\QUAKES ).

4 - To read the documentation for the kit after it has been imported, type the word READ followed by the name of the kit (e.g.,  READ   QUAKES ).

*The original philosophy about the SiMPLE construction kits was that they would all be distributed as pre-compiled "object modules" (file type: ".OBJ") which could then be placed into a standard library. But with the growing concern over computer viruses, spyware, etc., all new construction kits are now being distributed as "open source" software. This way they can be used either in the traditional "Command-line" mode (by compiling them yourself) or in the newer "Drag & Drop" mode (by using the "Append" compiler directive).