Allegro 4.4.2 build for OSX

This is a build of Allegro 4.4.2 for Mac OS X (i386 arch). It's quite difficult to build this version of the library on modern systems due to the outdated dependencies it has. These instructions require the use of the OSX 10.4 SDK.

All examples that actually draw a window (such as the grabber or miditest, etc) will not work properly on retina displays. If you know how to fix this, please feel free to let me know. Presumably, this can be fixed by bundling them as .app directories, which allows Mac OS X to run them with double pixels.

Extraneous files have been removed, as well as the demos. The examples are still there, though. The main reason for the existence of this repository is to have a premade build available for Mac OS X.

Compiling instructions

For those interested in building the library, here's a quick guide. Note that this repository only contains a build, and not the Allegro source files.

OSX Yosemite (10.10)

Allegro 4 is quite old and requires a number of deprecated header files that are long gone from the Xcode SDKs. To successfully compile the library, you'll need the following:

• Copy of the Allegro 4.4.2 source (download allegro-4.4.2.zip)
• Some dependencies (flac, libogg, libvorbis, opus, physfs, cmake, freetype, libpng, openssl, opusfile, theora; all of these are easily installed with Homebrew)
• The Mac OS X 10.4 universal SDK

For the SDK, you need to download the Xcode 3.1 installer (named xcode31_2199_developerdvd.dmg) which is available on the Apple Developer site. You need to register an account to get the download, which is listed as Xcode 3.1 Developer Tools.

Open the developer DVD image, then install the MacOSX10.4.Universal.pkg file in the Packages directory, which will place the SDK in /SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk. You can delete the Xcode 3.1 image now, since we only need this one file.

Now browse to your unzipped Allegro 4.4.2 source, make a directory called build and go there, and then type the following:

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
export CFLAGS=-m32
cmake -DCMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT=/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -DCMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4 ..

Note that we're forcing a 32-bit build, which is necessary to use the 10.4 SDK. If all goes well, CMake will have found and configured everything successfully. If there are any missing dependencies, it will tell you here. Non-critical warnings can be ignored.

Then, just type make. This should successfully build the framework and the associated binaries.

Dylib linking

Unfortunately, there's a problem that I haven't been able to resolve yet: building in this way causes binaries (such as the very useful dat utility) to look for the liballeg dylib in the absolute path where it ended up after the build process finished.

To fix this, I've added a script fixrpath.bash that relinks the dylib to a relative path (specifically, ../lib). This has already been done in this build, but it's useful in case you want to make your own build. Of course, it would be much nicer to not have to deal with this problem at all, by fixing it in the Allegro CMake file, but I don't know how to do that.

To explain how the fixrpath.bash script works, it's basically modifying the binary to look for the library elsewhere. In this example I'll make the dat utility look for liballeg.4.4.dylib in the ../lib/ directory, rather than the full path of my build.

# set relative path to the ../lib directory
install_name_tool -add_rpath @loader_path/../lib/ dat
# change dylib load from an absolute path to a relative path
install_name_tool -change /Users/msikma/test/allegro/build/lib/liballeg.4.4.dylib @rpath/liballeg.4.4.dylib dat

Note that the absolute path I give is unique to my compilation setup, and will be different for you. To find the exact path string to replace, use otool -lv dat. After this, the dat utility should work as long as the liballeg.4.4.dylib file is in the ../lib directory.

OSX El Capitan (10.11) and up

I'm not sure if the instructions work for El Capitan 10.11, but I know they don't work for Sierra 10.12. The following error is displayed:

...
[ 24%] Building C object CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/src/unix/ufile.c.o
[ 25%] Building C object CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/src/unix/utimer.c.o
[ 25%] Building C object CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/src/unix/uptimer.c.o
[ 25%] Building C object CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/src/unix/usystem.c.o
[ 25%] Building C object CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/src/unix/uthreads.c.o
[ 25%] Linking C shared library lib/liballeg.dylib
ld: in '/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks//Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Accelerate', malformed mach-o, symbol table not in __LINKEDIT
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make[2]: *** [lib/liballeg.4.4.2.dylib] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/allegro.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

• Compiler: Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.38)
• Linker: @(#)PROGRAM:ld PROJECT:ld64-274.1

This may be related to this question on Stack Overflow but I'm not sure. I haven't spent any time getting it to work.

Feedback

If you have any questions, or things to contribute, please let me know!

Copyright

© 2016, Michiel Sikma. MIT license. Allegro 4.4.2 is giftware licensed.