SDL and autotools

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mathieudel
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 7:27 pm

SDL and autotools

Post by mathieudel » Wed Nov 30, 2011 8:07 pm

Hi all,

I'm in the process of porting Aleph-One engine (http://marathon.sourceforge.net/) to the Wii in my Aleph-Wone project (http://code.google.com/p/aleph-wone/).
Using a bunch of shell scripts to chain and automate the different build processes (get third party libs, compile them, autogen, configure and make the application), I reached the point where it compiles flawlessly using devkitPro on Linux (it's a bit more challenging, and sloooow, from Windows, and does not work from MacOS).

The generated binary works pretty well considering its a first shot, but that will be the subject of future posts.

What bugs me now is wii-sdl : Aleph-One uses autotools to configure everything, and wii-sdl does not, so I had to hack a bit to get them working together.
I then saw that you created a version of the SDL library (is that the latest version ? http://sourceforge.net/projects/devkitp ... 2/download) that compiles fine with autotools so I decided to replace sdl-wii with your version.......... but !

Compiling it using wiiconf works great, but not using my own script. After digging for the problem, it appears I define the __WII__ symbol for my project, which triggers some code in the SDL_wiirwops.c file, which then does not compile. The exact same error is easily reproductible by changing __WII__ to __wii__ which is defined by -mrvl (I've just discovered this, and the fact that my __WII__ is useless).
Actually, the wii platform is not defined in this project, nor is the wii specific structure for file operations. I did not try right now but I think this particular bit of code could be retrieved directly from wii-sdl project.

So in short, the SDL compiles fine but chances are it does not link because of lacking rwops functions masked by the undefined __WII__ preprocessor macro. And if it is defined, it does not compile anymore due to missing bits of code that could be retrieved from wii-sdl.

Can something be done from your side concerning this ? Or I could try to make it work and provide you with a patch...
What about a repository where to share our findings and improvements (mine would be very scarce since I'm not a C/C++ guru) ?

Additionally, I will try and see if SDL sub-projects (SDL_image, SDL_ttf, ...) can be grabbed and compiled as is from SDL web sites once your library is built, instead of using wii-sdl's ones.


As a side note, I think you could :
- Remove libicon dependency from the wiiconf script. That does not make the build process to fail.
- Remove the CON_Init from the video driver : putting it here forces the game to have a visible console, which is not necessarily a good thing

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