[RedSlash]

FYI, I am a new owner of a Mac, and as such, I had decided to make a port my game to the Mac! I thought I would share some of the things that I learned when doing the port, which may serve as some useful information for C++ programmers wishing to do so as well.

The time it took for porting was about 45 mins for a C++ project with about ~20000 lines of code. Now, the amount of time I took isn't spectacular considering the hours of prep work has been done over time in maintaining the source code to be portable.

One of the things that helped big time was using CMake as the build system. CMake is a cross platform build system that can generate project files for your platform. On Windows, it can generate Microsoft Visual Studio Solution files or MinGW/Cygwin makefiles; on Linux it generates KDevelop or unix makefiles; and on Mac it can generate Xcode project files. For my Mac, I just downloaded the Mac version of CMake, ran it, and it produced a Xcode file which I just double clicked. Once the Xcode editor was open, everything was already setup and all I had to do was click "Build" to start compiling.

I think one of the most interesting topics about the Mac development is: How compatible is Linux to Mac, and vice versa. Here's what I have discovered. There appears to be two ways of building programs. One way is the UNIX compatible way, which involves using the ./configure and friends to build programs. These link with UNIX compatible libraries and I found that this compiles most Linux command line and X11 apps without major problems. The only annoyance is that all GUI apps built this way launches the X11 server (which you will be prompted that X11 will start) and an empty terminal on startup. The other way is building apps with Xcode. This way seems to build native Mac apps which links to the Mac libraries as opposed to the UNIX compatible ones. I don't think I was able to get any X11 apps compiled this way since Xcode decided not to include X11 headers and libs when compiling in Xcode. A few things in Xcode have changed, such as header file names like GL/gl.h, GL/glut.h have changed to OpenGL/gl.h, GLUT/glut.h respectively.

Linking OpenGL code (in Leopard) will also produce an error:

[Scrim]

This thread is a nice idea.

Here's one small tip that Bjorn helped me out with when I was trying to make a windows version of my contest entry (I wrote it on mac originally). Porting it was no biggie because I wrote it in python, but I did run into some problems: namely, copying plain-text files from one platform to the other.

Windows and Mac use a different format for their line breaks: Windows uses two control characters where Mac (and most unix-like systems) uses just one. This means copying text files (in my case, source code and various game configuration files) from one platform to the other can create a mess.

When I moved the above files to windows I discovered that all the line breaks were "missing" and my entire source file was one line... If you are porting in the other direction you'll find all your stuff has an extra character (usually shown as ^M if I recall) at the end of every line.

Two solutions:

1) Use ftp to move your files from mac to windows (or vice-versa). It's smart enough to convert the linebreaks.

2) Use these handy command line tools:

dosunix INPUTFILE OUTPUTFILE

unixdos INPUTFILE OUTPUTFILE

They do the conversion as well. In my case I used a little shell script to make windows versions of my various files:

for i in `ls *.txt`
do
unixdos $i ../windows/textfiles/$i
done

If you are porting the other direction you'd use "dosunix" instead.

I don't think unixdos and dosunix are installed on OSX by default, but you can download them easily enough. I use FINK, which is a nice debian-style package management ap for installing various open-source tools on the Mac.

[DeveloperX]

A solution I use for handling that is to open the files in Wordpad and immediately click the save button.
It puts the right newline characters in the file for windows.
Now, remember that is WORDPAD Not Microsoft Word.
Word will mess your code up badly.

If you cannot find Wordpad, go to start->Run, type "write" and then hit enter.

Simple solution to an annoying problem.

Don't have windows? Get a VMWare setup on whatever you use, and get a copy of windows 98 or xp to install in the vm to quickly do your tasks. Or, if that feels too much like piracy, then just walk into a computer store like bestbuy with your files on a usb pendrive, and use their windows computer to make your conversions.
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Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[RedSlash]

Ahh yes, python is pretty strict with the newlines and formatting. For C/C++ source code, it is better to use UNIX line feeds even on windows because windows compilers can work with UNIX line feeds, but UNIX compilers don't like windows line feed.

If you don't have dos2unix or unix2dos but you have perl:

dos2unix in perl:

[DeveloperX]

More tips:
Always use lowercase filenames & extensions.
Never use spaces in filenames or directory names.
Never use odd characters such as %()[]{}'`~!@ ..etc
Try to keep directory trees to 2 levels or less.
eg: