compiling.txt

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***  COMPILING  GEARHEAD  ***
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Download the Free Pascal Compiler from www.freepascal.org.
Type "ppc386 arena". That should be it.

GearHead takes advantage of many FPC mode features, so if you get
strange errors while compiling check to make sure you're in the
right mode. The game probably won't compile under Delphi or Borland
compatability modes.

Note that there may be problems if compiling for DOS using the FPCv1.0.
It seems that DirectoryPresent crashes when used. I'd advise towards
compiling for Windows when possible. If you absolutely must compile
for DOS, edit the file gears.pp and remove the CheckDirectoryPresent
procedure along with the call to it during initialization.

Many thanks to Michalis Kamburelis for helping to make GearHead
FPCv2 compatable, and portable across OS's.

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***  COMPILING  GEARHEAD  WITH  SDL  ***
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Download latest jedi-sdl from CVS from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedi-sdl/ and everything should compile
fine straight away.

Unless you're using the public release of Jedi-SDL, in which case this
is going to get way more complicated. To start off you're going
to need the following things:

- The GearHead sources (should be the file this came in)
- The GearHead image archive (get it from the web site,
                        or email me for a copy)
- FreePascal, available from www.freepascal.org
- Jedi-SDL, available from www.delphi-jedi.org
- The SDL, SDL_TTF, SDL_Mixer, and SDL_Image runtimes, available from
  www.libsdl.org or as part of the Jedi package

First things first. Install the compiler, the Jedi-SDL source
files, and the SDL runtimes. Make sure that the Jedi-SDL units
are in FPC's search path. You'll need to compile for either
Windows or Linux since AFAIK the package doesn't work in DOS.
Install the GH images in your GearHead directory; they should
be in a subdirectory called "Image".

Next, you must get down to actually compiling the Jedi
sources with FreePascal. See the document "Using Jedi-SDL
with Free Pascal" for an explanation on how to do so. Several
options need to be set before the units will compile correctly.
If you don't use the IDE, the following compiler directives
will do the trick:

{$OUTPUT_FORMAT PECOFF}
{$MODE DELPHI}
{$ASMMODE intel}
{$DEFINE FPC}

In addition, I couldn't get the unit SDL_Image to work properly
without a bit of modification. I had to comment out lines 150 and
200, the references to "IMG_string_equals", before any program
linked to that unit would run. Did I do a good thing, or did I
open a pandora's box of potential problems? Only time and the email
I sent to the Jedi-SDL dev team will tell for sure.

Finally you should be ready to compile. To link the program with
the SDL units, define a "SDLMODE" symbol. This can be done from the
command line by using -dSDLMODE when compiling arena.