XBoing

About

Breakout is a 1976 arcade game from Atari in which players bounce a ball off a paddle to destroy rows of bricks; it was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow and prototyped by Steve Wozniak with help from Steve Jobs. XBoing is a faithful SDL2 modernization of Justin C. Kibell's 1996 X11 original XBoing 2.4, preserving the original's level format, scoring, and physics constants while replacing its Xlib/XPM/`/dev/dsp` internals with SDL2, SDL2_image, SDL2_mixer, and a CMake build. Current release is 1.0.11, distributed via Homebrew on macOS and Linux, with a Debian package also available; all six phases of the project's integration roadmap are complete.

How it differs from the original

The 1996 Xlib sources are preserved verbatim in the repo's original/ directory for reference, while the new SDL2 implementation swaps XPM graphics for PNG, .au sound for OGG/WAV, and bitmap XLFD fonts for bundled TrueType fonts — all 80 original levels and the original physics constants are otherwise unchanged. The Debian package additionally enables a shared, system-wide high-score table that the Homebrew build does not provide.

Getting started

Install via Homebrew on macOS or Linux, or build from source with CMake and SDL2 (a Debian package is also available). Move the paddle with the mouse or arrow keys, launch the ball with Space, fire bullets with K, and design custom levels with the built-in level editor; the full key map and options are documented in the included manual page.

History

Justin C. Kibell wrote the original XBoing on a SparcStation 2 to learn Xlib, releasing version 2.4 on 22 November 1996 via ftp.x.org; the current SDL2 modernization is credited to J Freeman starting in 2025.

Licensing & legal

• The modernization is MIT licensed (2025-2026, J Freeman), while the preserved 1993-1997 sources remain under Justin C. Kibell's original X Consortium-style permissive license.