anyways, i am in the middle of porting a certain game from a normal Mac framework to a iPhone/iPod Touch device! Most of the stuff is already there, like the Pascal compiler, but the main libraries are missing!
I'm talking about SDL, but after some thinkering i got everything done! Here is what i did after checking out every repository
SDL
well this was the easiest, porting this lib started in a past google SoC and they did a pretty good job. To get the lib it's sufficient to unpack the Xcode_iPhone.tar.gz and press "build".
SDL_net
this one wasn't particuarly difficult, as it required just a correct configuration in the Xcode.tar.gz project. In the project settings, set the Base SDK to Device - iPhoneOS (or Simulator according to your needs) and Architectures to Standard.
SDL_ttf
i had to google a little to get this done: ttf is built exactly as SDL_net, but all the applications built with it are hard depending on libfreetype. Of course this library is available for the iphone, but it's difficult to configure it correctly. Luckily i read this site which clearly explained what to do; include that file in your application frameworks and add the -lz flag to the linker options, and you are done!
SDL_image
the hardest of all, just because the svn repository was out of date! In fact there's this guy who did a neat job for introducing a native support for png, jpeg etc instead of third party libraries. His patches were accepted in mainstream, but the iphone project in the repo has not been updated and can't compile!!! I emailed sdl-list but got no reply... for now it's sufficient to download his updated package and compile from it.
SDL_mixer
this was not as easy as net but i guess that porting for this project has yet to start. For the moment i got a working library just by removing all the native_midi_mac stuff, as it's the only part that relies on a framework which is not present in the iPhone. I didn't need any midi support, so i was satisfied with it already.
Beware that while simulation will give no problems, there's an issue for the device! In fact the simluator is likely to load the ogg functions from the shared libs of the system, but since ogg is nowere in the iphone, we have to provide our own!
so let's grab libvorbis and libogg and compile them the same way we compiled libfreetype; i had some problems with the paths when compiling libvorbis, due to the macports installations. I resolved by placing the arm version of libogg.a into the lib directory of macports (/opt/local/lib) and creating a symlink to it named libogg.dylib. Obviously make backups so you can restore your installation!
Now that you know what to do, you can keep updated the freely available versions that i compiled! they are the latest revision... of today! If something doesn't work complain with the SDL guys! I do hope that by the 1.3 release, SDL for iPhone will become officially supported
click here to download all the libraries, both for the simulator and for the device (debug version obv)
if you find them useful, drop a comment here, it'll mean that my work is appreciated :)
Vittorio
