Orbiter Programmer's Guide

This page was written by Pluto and imported with their permission when LinuxMCE branched off in February, 2007. In general any information should apply to LinuxMCE. However, this page should be edited to reflect changes to LinuxMCE and remove old references to Pluto.

The Orbiter is really a Pluto DCE Devices just like any other. The main class, Orbiter, is a normal **DCE command** implementation. However, the Orbiter class was written so that it has no platform-specific functions, such as graphics and sound. It handles the basic logic, and calls pure virtual functions that derived classes must implement to handle the platform-specific commands. OrbiterSDL is derived from Orbiter and implements these functions using the SDL library, such as DrawRectangle, DrawImage, PlaySound, etc. You will see that most of the code and virtually all of the logic is contained in the base Orbiter class. Therefore, it is a fairly easy task to make a new version of Orbiter for a platform other than SDL, perhaps one that uses Windows SDK calls, or another image library.

Orbiter devices are also embedded within Bluetooth Dongle for details.

Use the Pluto Admin Website to build an entirely new user interface of your own, or change Pluto's stock UI.