CCSoftWork

Claudio Cavallini Software house
(Mister TV)

MaxiTicTacToe is a variant of tic-tac-toe (in Commonwealth English: "Noughts and Crosses").
The game is similiar to tic-tac-toe, but the winner has to get 5 signs in a row instead of 3 (on a 20 x 20 board).

The game can be played either person vs person or person vs computer.

It is possible to get the position suggested by the computer as well as to display all the positions filled from the beginning of the game (to view the last position filled or to recreate the game).

In addition to Xs and Os, there is a position that cannot be marked either by X or O (like black-shaded squares in the crossword grid).

At the beginning of the game, the grid is usually empty, although it is possible to create boards with positions already marked (like in crosswords puzzles where some letters are already filled).
Selecting "Create/Edit game board" in the "Game board" menu, four buttons are shown above the grid allowing to set the X, O, empty or non-markable positions (by clicking on the different positions).
Of course, the boards created can be saved and then uploaded in the memory.

Note: The Company received a public support due to Covid emergency during the year 2020.

MaxiTicTacToe is an app written in Java, so it runs indifferently on Windows, Linux and macOS; to do this, however, a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) or a JDK (Java Development Kit) must be installed on the computer, it is better to install the JDK.

You can download the appropriate JDK for your operating system from the "AdoptOpenJDK" website (https://adoptopenjdk.net/)
Once connected to the website, select "OpenJDK 8 (LTS)", while as JVM (Java Virtual Machine) you can leave "HotSpot" selected; be careful to select the right version of "OpenJDK" because as soon as you connect to the website, version 11 is selected by default and NOT version 8.
After this selection, click on the "Other platforms" button, and on the page that appears, click on the appropriate JDK for your operating system and your architecture (the procedure is free and takes a few minutes).

Below are three screenshots with the points where you need to click highlighted by red arrows; the second and third screens refer to the download of the JDK installer for recent versions of Windows (such as Windows 10 and Windows 11).

Once the JDK is installed, the second and last short step is to set the JAVA_HOME and Path environment variables.

Some JDK installers set the JAVA_HOME (and Path) automatically; for example the installer for Windows 10 and Windows 11 sets them automatically, so no particular action is required on your part (you can always click on the "Next" button and if you want you can ignore the following text written in blue).

* * *

As written above, the JDK installer for Windows 10 and Windows 11 sets the environment variables automatically, but this is true for the CURRENT installer version, i.e. the one available at the moment I write these lines (the date is written at the end of this section).

For one of the previous installer versions ("OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_8u332b09.msi" file) this was NOT true, and since it could be like this for future versions as well (although it is quite unlikely) it is useful to describe what to do also in this case:

In that version of the installer, on Windows 11 to have the installer set the environment variables (it is always possible to set them "by hand") you had to act on the "Set JAVA_HOME variable" item (by clicking on the red X to the left of the item), as indicated in the following three images:

I repeat that with the CURRENT version of the installer the clicks of the three previous images are NOT necessary (in fact, as you can see in the CURRENT version the icon to the left of the "Set JAVA_HOME variable" item is WITHOUT the red X).

Furthermore, still on Windows 11, to launch the installer it was necessary to launch it from "Windows Terminal (Admin)" (you can bring up this item with a right-click on "Start"); and (from the terminal window) you had to write

cd Downloads

and then you had to write

.\OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_8u332b09.msi

* * *

Some friends told me that on Linux and macOS the environment variables are automatically set by the installer (the one downloaded from "AdoptOpenJDK").

In any case if your installer does NOT expect to set JAVA_HOME automatically, on the Internet you will find many resources on how to set JAVA_HOME manually, just do searches for, for example, "JAVA_HOME linux" or "JAVA_HOME mac" (usually the search are not case sensitive, so when you do a search you can write either "JAVA_HOME" or "java_home" or "Java_Home", but when you set it as an environment variable it is better to write JAVA_HOME in uppercase).

Many of these resources refer to proprietary JDKs, while MaxiTicTacToe is based on the Open Source JDK; so on, for example, Windows, the JAVA_HOME instead of (for example)

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_102

must be set to (again for example)

C:\Program Files\Eclipse Adoptium\jdk-8.0.332.9-hotspot\

For example a guide in English you can find it at https://www.baeldung.com/java-home-on-windows-7-8-10-mac-os-x-linux, another guide also in English (full of images) is available at the link https://javatutorial.net/set-java-home-windows-10.

Last updated: November 17, 2022