Installing Agar on Windows XP, 7 and Earlier (MinGW32) - LibAgar

Before you continue, make sure that your Cygwin installation is up to date. Run Cygwin Setup and check that the following packages are enabled. To install sources for a particular package, check the box under the "Src?" column in the Cygwin installer.

• Devel / make
• Devel / gcc-core
• Devel / patch
• Devel / mingw64-i686-binutils
• Devel / mingw64-i686-gcc-core
• Devel / mingw64-i686-pthreads
• Devel / mingw64-i686-runtime

The following packages are optional:

• Devel / mingw64-i686-freetype2 (recommended font engine)
• Devel / mingw64-i686-libjpeg-turbo (for JPEG image support)
• Devel / mingw64-i686-libpng (for PNG image support)
• Devel / mingw64-i686-SDL (recommended, enables sdlfb and sdlgl drivers)
• Devel / mingw64-i686-gettext (multi-language support)
• Devel / mingw64-i686-win-iconv (extra encodings support)

Developers may also wish to install:

• Archive / unzip
• Devel / gdb
• Devel / patch
• Devel / subversion
• Interpreters / perl (enables support for separate building with ./configure --srcdir=path)

Start up the Cygwin shell. Set the $MINGWROOT environment variable to the installation directory. For quick access, you may also wish to create a shortcut to this directory in your Desktop or Favorites.

  export MINGWROOT=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw

It is good practice to use -g in your global compiler flags, so that debugging information will be included in the build:

  export CFLAGS="-O2 -g"
  export CXXFLAGS="-O2 -g"

Using -O0 instead of -O2 can also improve the debugger's ability to produce reliable traces.

Download the Agar sources, compile and install using:

  $ tar -xzf agar-1.7.0.tar.gz
  $ cd agar-1.7.0
  $ ./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 \
      --prefix=$MINGWROOT \
      --enable-debug \
      --with-{freetype,sdl2,png,jpeg,gl}=$MINGWROOT \
      --without-{fontconfig,gettext,iconv}
  $ make depend all && make install

There are a number of build options available (see ./configure --help).

• --enable-debug is recommended for developers since it enables assertions and type safety checking for event handler arguments. It impacts performance significantly and should not be used in release builds.
• --disable-threads will improve performance if thread-safety is not needed.
• Omit --with-sdl2 if the SDL2 driver is not needed. For SDL 1.x support, you can use --with-sdl instead (cannot be used along with SDL2).
• Omit --with-png and --with-jpeg if the ability to load images in PNG and JPEG format is not required.
• If native language support is needed add --enable-nls, --with-iconv=$MINGWROOT and --with-gettext=$MINGWROOT.

If you wish to make the Agar manual available from cygwin's manual reader, append $MINGWROOT/share/man to your /etc/man.conf. If you don't need the manual installed, using the ./configure --without-manpages option will speed up the build process.

Agar provides a test suite for developers, agartest.exe. It must be compiled and installed separately.

  $ cd agar-1.7.0/tests
  $ ./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 \
      --prefix=$MINGWROOT \
      --with-agar=$MINGWROOT
  $ make depend all && make install

Then execute the installed agartest.exe in the $MINGWROOT\bin directory.

You can also check that Agar is working with hello.c:

  #include <agar/core.h>
  #include <agar/gui.h>
  
  int
  main(int argc, char *argv)
  {
          AG_Window *win;
          
          if (AG_InitCore(NULL, 0) == -1 ||
              AG_InitGraphics(0) == -1) {
                  return (1);
          }
          win = AG_WindowNew(0);
          AG_LabelNew(win, 0, "Hello, world!");
          AG_WindowShow(win);
          AG_EventLoop();
          return (0);
  }

To compile hello.c as a standalone Windows executable, use:

  $ i686-w64-mingw32-gcc -o hello \
      `$MINGWROOT/bin/agar-config --cflags` hello.c \
      `$MINGWROOT/bin/agar-config --libs`

1) If you are using Agar's wgl driver (the default on Windows) and your application freezes a few seconds after focus is switched to a different application, this is an Aero bug affecting OpenGL applications. To disable Aero, right-click on the Windows Desktop, click on Personalize, and select a basic theme such as "Windows Classic". Alternatively, you can work around this problem using a compatibility tweak: right-click on your application .exe file, go to Properties / Compatibility, and check the "Disable visual themes" option.