Rubygame Mac Pack

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-10-28 | Comments: 3 | Filed under: Announcements

One of the things I noticed as I was updating the Rubygame installation instructions was how much of a hassle it was for Mac users to acquire all the dependencies. There are precompiled DLLs available for Windows, but Mac users still had to install a whole development environment just to compile libraries to use Rubygame. Obviously, that's a huge barrier to using Rubygame!

Well, no more!

Over the past couple days, I have compiled and packaged up everything (hopefully) that Mac users will need to use Rubygame, complete with a handy (albeit rather basic) install script! It will install the libraries, rsdl, precompiled ffi gem, and rubygame for you. The README also tells you how to install them yourself, in case you don't trust my simple script (which uses sudo, so it will ask for your password).

The Mac Pack includes precompiled versions of:

flac-1.2.1
freetype-2.3.9
libmikmod-3.1.11
libogg-1.1.3
libvorbis-1.1.0
SDL_image-1.2.8
SDL_mixer-1.2.9
SDL_ttf-2.0.9
SDL-1.2.14
smpeg-r389
ffi-0.5.1 (with gemspec tweaks)
rsdl

However, there are a few limitations:

So far there are only Intel versions. Sorry, these won't work on the older PowerPC Macs. I hope to create a Universal (Intel + PowerPC) Mac Pack in the near future. If there's anyone out there who would like to help with that (especially if you have a PowerPC Mac and are comfortable compiling software), please leave a comment or contact me.
The rsdl version has been compiled for the default version of Ruby that's included with Mac OS X (1.8.6). If you want to use it with a different version of Ruby, you will have to compile rsdl yourself. If anyone has suggestions for making this more flexible, I'd love to hear from you. In the long run, I'm looking into ways to eliminate the need for rsdl entirely.
This was prepared on Leopard. I have no idea if it will work on other version of Mac OS X.

Anyway, here's the first version of the Rubygame Mac Pack!

Please give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

Comments

Mk12 submitted a comment on 2009-10-28 #

One annoying problem is that for some reason a shebang to rsdl won’t work. It flickers between the terminal and the trying-to-open rsdl for a while and then stops and spits out “Bus Error”. It works fine executing “rsdl mygame.rb” though… But making it work with the normal ruby interpreter would be even better.

TesX submitted a comment on 2010-08-06 #

Please put sudo gem install –remote rake before installing other gems.

They’re not installed by default.

Thanks :)

Click170 submitted a comment on 2010-12-17 #

Please update your blog post and or script to add rake to the list of dependencies which are installed. The omission seems to be causing a lot of problems, for myself as well as other people who are posting in forums which Google leads me to.

Otherwise, nice packaging :)