I have instructions on setting up Visual C++ 2005 Express for SDL and OpenGL on my OpenGL 2D book site. I based those instructions on what I had to do to set up Visual C++ on my brother’s computer running Windows XP. When I used the instructions to set up Visual C++ on my Windows Vista virtual machine, a major problem occurred. Visual C++ crashed every time I tried to add an existing file to a project. The crashes occurred because I hadn’t installed the necessary service packs.

There are two service packs you must install for Visual C++ to work with Vista. The first is Visual C++ 2005 Express Service Pack 1. The second is Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista. Both of these service packs can be downloaded at Microsoft’s developer site.

The latest version of SDL, 1.2.12, is available to download from the SDL website. Anyone using Mac OS X and supporting joysticks in their game should download the update because it fixes a joystick calibration bug. When starting a game, SDL would record joystick axis events when the joystick was not moved, causing movement in the game with no joystick movement. The only way to stop the unwanted movement was to move the joystick up, down, left, and right. The 1.2.12 update eliminates the unwanted movement, making joysticks work the way you would expect on Mac OS X.

I got an email from someone who was having trouble setting up SDL on Eclipse. I have never used Eclipse so I could not provide him much help. He eventually found a solution and emailed it to me so I could share it with you.

There are four things you have to do to get SDL working with Eclipse on Mac OS X in addition to what I outlined in my SDL tutorial. First, you must copy the files SDLMain.h and SDLMain.m to the same directory as your SDL program. My interpretation of this statement is if you create an Eclipse project and add your source code files to the project folder, you must also add SDLMain.h and SDLMain.m to the project folder.

Second, you must add the directory where your SDL headers reside to the Directories setting for the GCC C++ compiler. Your headers most likely reside in the following directory:

/Library/Frameworks/SDL.framework/Headers

Third, you must add linker flags for the Cocoa and SDL frameworks as well as the path to the SDLMain.m file.

-framework Cocoa
-framework SDL
/Path/To/YourProject/SDLMain.m

Fourth, you must change the following line of code in SDLMain.m:

#import “SDL.h”

to the following:

#include SDL/SDL.h

Put less than and greater than signs around the SDL/SDL.h. For some reason I can’t get those characters to show up in the blog.