Dietmar demonstrated the incredibly cool Numpty Physics game on his Maemo device yesterday and I liked it so much that I had to check immediately whether it will compile for plain old x86, too. And, guess what, it works like a charm.

All you have to do is to check out the code from the SVN repository, ensure you have the SDL and SDL-image headers installed change into the trunk directory and run make. If the linker fails for you as it did for me (complaining about X11 symbols), just add an extra -lX11 to the linker command line.

Before you can run NP you will have to create a symbolic link /usr/share/numptyphysics that points to the trunk directory of your SVN checkout. Then run i686/Game and enjoy. Using a mouse to draw items instead of a stylus is obviously not as straight-forward as using the stylus, but it works very well nevertheless.

Update: If you enjoy using bleeding edge compilers you might be interested Adrian’s patch that will make Numpty Physics compile with gcc 4.3.