This is a "rough draft" of SDL2 for MacOS 9 (also working on System
7.6 68k), using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it
building in CW, and the start of a "macosclassic" video driver was
created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be
done. Event handling is just started, there is no audio etc. etc. etc.
NOTE: This is obvious in flux, and active development. So if something
is broken, try again tomorrow...next week...maybe? I'm including a
known working (but old) "_prev" version that will NOT be updated, for
archival reasons.
<
https://github.com/laulandn/sdl2macos9>
NOTE: This may be out of sync with the latest .sit file, YMMV, sorry.
Obviously Mac Finder file creators and types and resource forks won't
be there, but should otherwise work.
\----
Dev notes: Getting just SDL2 itself building, did take a lot of
effort, but it was mostly "mechanical", dealing with the foibles of
CodeWarrior, creating project files from scratch, things it couldn't
handle, "simple" things like headers missing that are standard on more
modern systems, etc. The first step was doing that with all "dummy"
drivers. Was a bit shocked I got even that far. The results did
absolutely NOTHING in the test programs. With a dummy video driver,
they don't even try to set up textures, etc.
The key missing part was a Classic Mac OS "video" driver, which also
includes event handling. I determined it was not possible to "port"
the SDL1 driver due to too many changes in paradigms of SDL itself.
Once I'd sketched a new one out, and got it hooked into the proper
places, the debug output showed the test programs actually working. I
then started adding basic Mac OS implementations. This effort is in
src/video/macosclassic. (I used the QNX driver as a skeleton as it was
the smallest and easier to understand.)
Mini-FAQ:
"What is SDL?": Like DirectX, a library for multimedia games/apps, but
runs on many many platforms.
"Why is this interesting?": Games, potentially...
"Why not SDL3?": Because you have to learn to walk before you can fly.
"Why not Retro68?": Because CodeWarrior is a heck of a lot more user
friendly for casual hacking.
"Why MacOS 7/8/9 in 2025?": Because it looked like it was possible,
and nobody else bothered.
"Why CW6/7?": Because I was already hacking on SDL 1.2 with those and
they were handy.
"Where are the games?!?": There's a terrible one included that
(mostly) works, but this is very early days...maybe try a port
yourself and see what works?
* * *
See [Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) 1.2][1] and [SDL 1.2 Add-On
Libraries][2] for the older, "supported" version.
Compatibility
Architecture: 68k PPC
MacOS 9 PPC (probably 8.5 also), MacOS 7.6 M68k, using CodeWarrior 6
and 7 Pro.
[1]:
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/sdl-1213-simple-directmedia-layer
[2]:
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/sdl-12-add-libraries
