Cross Compile Allegro 5 Programs in Linux for Windows
The Allegro game programming library has released v5 of their popular library and with it comes a whole mess of great changes. Thing is, since most of the applications you make with it are going to be games, your main audience lives in Windows. Since I am really upset with Microsofts offerings in this area I needed a way to capture this audience without having to drive myself insane.
What follows is how I am making Windows executables in Linux using Allegro. Please note that I live in Ubuntu (currently 10.10, Maverick Meerkat). You may have to make some slight changes to fit your distro but that should not be a big deal. These instructions assume a clean installation where no other copy of Allegro has been installed (not sure if that would be a problem or not as I have not tested).
- Install the required programs:
sudo apt-get install cmake mingw32 - Retrieve and uncompress DirectX:
Download and copy the DirectX headers and libraries to/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/. Note the file structure within the archive should compare to the mentioned directory. When prompted to overwrite any files do so but make sure you have a backup first in case something explodes. - Retrieve and uncompress Allegro 5:
Download allegro-5.x.x.tar.gz from their site. Uncompress some place easy to get to. I used my desktop as we can delete this when done. - Compile from source:
In a terminal type
cd [path to uncompressed archive] && mkdir build && cd build && cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/Toolchain-mingw.cmake .. && make && sudo make install
This may take a little while depending on your hardware.
You should now have a functioning cross compiler setup for Allegro 5. Just replace gcc with i586-mingw32msvc-gcc or g++ with i586-mingw32msvc-g++ (for example, I compiled my first test with i586-mingw32msvc-g++ alleg.cpp -lallegro.dll -lallegro_image.dll -lallegro_font.dll -o alleg.exe). The DLLs you will need are in /usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin/. You may now delete all of our working files on your desktop (or wherever you put them).
There are still one or two things I need to figure out. For one, dynamically linked programs are peachy on Linux; I am comfortable in my assumption that most people using Linux either already expect this or are willing to learn. Windows, not so much. I want to statically link for that platform but I have yet to experiment with that. Another thing is the fact that my current method has Windows opening up a console window in addition to the “main” window. I am sure this is also very simple but have not yet played with it.