Windows Installation Guide

From Rubygame

Gather Dependencies

• Ruby, the language itself. The easiest option here is the one-click installer. This will install Ruby and a number of useful libraries without any hassle.

• SDL. Download the Win32 binary package, e.g. "SDL-1.2.14-win32.zip".

The rest are optional dependencies, but highly recommended. If you don't have them, you won't be able to use certain features of Rubygame.

• SDL_image. Grab the Win32 binary package, e.g. "SDL_image-1.2.8-win32.zip".
• SDL_mixer. Just like before, grab the Win32 binary package, e.g. "SDL_mixer-1.2.9-win32.zip".
• SDL_ttf. Again, get the Win32 binary package, e.g. "SDL_ttf-2.0.9-win32.zip".
• SDL_gfx (download for Windows). Many thanks to a generous Rubygame user (bmatthew1) for providing a compiled Windows DLL for SDL_gfx!

Once you have downloaded everything, unzip them and copy all *.dll files into the appropriate directory, depending on your version of Windows:

• 64-bit Windows 7 or Vista: Copy to C:\windows\syswow64\ (This directory only exists on 64-bit Windows. If it doesn't exist, you probably have 32-bit Windows, which is the most common.)
• 32-bit Windows 7, Vista, XP, and earlier: Copy to C:\windows\system32\

This will allow the libraries to be detected and loaded by Rubygame.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You should not expect or even force the users of your game to do this. You should supply all required DLL's for your game (including SDL) within your application folder. That way, users don't need administrator rights to install your application and the system32 directory is not cobbled with third-party DLL's.

Install Rubygame

The simplest way to install Rubygame is: gem install rubygame

Note: There is a known issue with Ruby-FFI version 0.6 on Windows. If you experience any problem installing Ruby-FFI, please install an earlier version with gem install ffi --version "<0.6". Then try again to install Rubygame with gem install rubygame.

Or you can download the source from Github and follow the installation instructions in README.

Conclusion

If all goes well, you have successfully installed Rubygame. Try to execute require 'rubygame' in an irb session and run the provided samples to ensure that everything is acceptable.

If you have any trouble installing Rubygame, please post in the forums.