rts/doc/BUILD-win9x.md

Cross-compilation for Win9x

Creating a toolchain targetting i386-mingw32 is not usually possible with the distribution-provided packages. This documentation describes which versions are known to work so far, as well as detailed configuration scripts.

The following documentation assumes the installation prefix $HOME/i386-mingw32 for the GNU toolchain. However, feel free to change this value, if required.

Some specific library versions might be hard to find, so download links are provided.

Environment variables

Since it is desirable to avoid messing with system-level libraries, when building for Win9x, rts will look for dependencies by inspecting the following environment variables:

• SDL_PATH
• SDL_TTF_PATH
• FREETYPE_PATH
• SDL_MIXER_PATH

Also, the directory containing the GNU toolchain binaries (which should be located at $HOME/i386-mingw32/bin by default) must be added to the PATH variable.

gcc

From own experience, modern versions of gcc cannot be used to compile a cross-compiler for Win9x. Instead, a much older version is required. So far, gcc-3.4.5 is the latest known version to work.

Known issues

• Take into account only C99 is supported by gcc-3.4.5.
• gcc-3.4.5 complains about the use of -ffunction-sections and -fdata-sections.

../gcc-3.4.5-20060117-2/configure --disable-nls --disable-rpath \
    --disable-win32-registry --enable-languages=c --enable-sjlj-exceptions \
    --enable-threads=win32 --prefix=$HOME/i386-mingw32 \
    --program-prefix=i386-mingw32- --target=i386 -mingw32 --with-gnu-as \
    --with-gnu-ld

gcc-core-3.4.5-20060117-2-src.tar.gz

binutils

GNU binutils is usually not so problematic, so any version should do. Only binutils-2.35 has been tested.

../binutils-2.35/configure --prefix=$HOME/i386-mingw32 --target=i386-mingw32

mingwrt and w32api

So far, only versions mingwrt-3.15.2-mingw32 and w32api-3.13-mingw32 have been tested.

Known issues

• Some hacks have to be done in order to compile these libraries. These are described on the script below.

../w32api-3.13-mingw32/configure --prefix=$HOME/i386-mingw32 --host=i386-mingw32
# Hack at line below
cd mingwrt-3.15.2-mingw32/ && cp -r include/* ~/i386-mingw32/include/
../mingwrt-3.15.2-mingw32/configure --prefix=$HOME/i386-mingw32 --target=i386-mingw32
../sdl-1.2.15-src/configure --host=i386-mingw32 --prefix=/home/xavier/sdl-1.2.15 \
    --enable-shared=no CC=i386-mingw32-gcc

mingw-runtime-3.15.2

mingw-w32api-3.13

freetype (not required)

Only freetype-2.4.8 is known to work so far.

Known issues

• Apparently, out of source builds are not possible.

cd freetype-2.4.8-src/ && ./configure --prefix=$HOME/freetype-2.4.8 \
        --host=i386-mingw32 --enable-shared=no CC=i386-mingw32-gcc

SDL

sdl-1.2.15 is the latest version supported version for the Win9x family of operating systems. In order to keep things easy, the script below configures SDL as a static library.

../sdl-1.2.15-src/configure --host=i386-mingw32 --prefix=$HOME/sdl-1.2.15 \
    --enable-shared=no CC=i386-mingw32-gcc \
    CFLAGS='-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections'

DirectX headers and static libraries

DirectX can help with hardware acceleration on older hardware. Fortunately, the SDL team distribute both source and binaries that can be included when building sdl-1.2.15. While two tarballs are distributed, only directx-devel.tar.gz has been tested so far.

directx-devel.tar.gz directx-source.tar.z

../sdl-1.2.15-src/configure --host=i386-mingw32 --prefix=$HOME/sdl-1.2.15 \
    --enable-shared=no CC=i386-mingw32-gcc \
    CFLAGS="-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections \
    -I$HOME/directx-devel/include -L$HOME/directx-devel/lib"

In order to take advantage of DirectX, remember to assign the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to directx before running rts.

SDL_mixer

Only SDL_mixer-1.2.12 is known to work so far. Since rts only uses WAVE files, support for other audio formats is not required.

../SDL_mixer-1.2.12-src/configure --host=i386-mingw32 --enable-shared=no \
    --prefix=$HOME/SDL_mixer-1.2.12 --disable-music-cmd --disable-music-mod \
    --disable-music-ogg --disable-music-mp3 --disable-music-midi \
    --disable-music-flac CC=i386-mingw32-gcc --with-sdl-prefix=$HOME/sdl-1.2.15 \
    CFLAGS='-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections'

../SDL_gfx-2.0.26-src/configure --host=i386-mingw32 --enable-shared=no \
    --prefix=$HOME/SDL_gfx-2.0.26 --with-sdl-prefix=$HOME/sdl-1.2.15 \
    CFLAGS='-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections' \
    CC=i386-mingw32-gcc

ENET

../enet-1.3.17/configure --prefix=$HOME/enet-1.3.17-win32 \
    --host=i386-mingw32 CFLAGS='-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections' \
    CC=i386-mingw32-gcc