macOS Convert Windows application to Mac application

Stéphane-M said:

Could you help us ?

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Help you how? What kind of help are you looking for?

It depends on how the application was designed. It could be a bit of work, or it could be lots of work. Mac supports C++ and OpenGL. So that's covered. But any part of the code that deals with the non-OpenGL user interface and/or integrates with Windows will probably have to be re-written. Probably in Objective-C because that's the language used by all of the Mac libraries.

This might be an opportunity to redesign the application to abstract out the game logic from the presentation logic. In other words, move toward an MVC design which is recommend in all of the Apple docs.

mfram said:

It depends on how the application was designed. It could be a bit of work, or it could be lots of work. Mac supports C++ and OpenGL. So that's covered. But any part of the code that deals with the non-OpenGL user interface and/or integrates with Windows will probably have to be re-written. Probably in Objective-C because that's the language used by all of the Mac libraries.

This might be an opportunity to redesign the application to abstract out the game logic from the presentation logic. In other words, move toward an MVC design which is recommend in all of the Apple docs.

Click to expand...

Also supports standard Posix pthreads, and the C++ STL library. Plus good support for all kinds of image files, good support for Audio, no idea what Glew and OPAL-ODE would be doing.

1. Create a new C++ project in Xcode.
2. Get the C++ source itself (.cpp) not the Visual Studio Project File
3.Import the code into Xcode
4. You will have to import some Frameworks
=====NOTE=====
This might not work. It depends on the functions you are using. For example
windows.h does not exist on the mac. If you get an error it might be because you are using Windows only functions. Be sure to google to errors and look for Mac equivalents.

Just for the fun of it, I tried importing this code into an Xcode project just to see what would happen. Even after adding the frameworks I felt were probably needed, the initial compile tried compiling 162 files for a grand total of 77535 errors and 2993 warnings.

It looks like the UI is written using GLUT and various libraries that depend on GLUT. Unfortunately, GLUT is not included with Mac. But it does appear there is a DarwinPorts version of it. So all is not lost. It may be possible to port this with enough effort.

I'm guessing the way to get this to work is to try and get the GLUT stuff (and this app) to work under X11. It wouldn't be a "native" Cocoa app. Creating a Cocoa version would require re-writing pretty much the entire project.

mfram said:

It looks like the UI is written using GLUT and various libraries that depend on GLUT. Unfortunately, GLUT is not included with Mac.

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To be honest, I haven't used GLUT (or any of OpenGL), but http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa2008/qa1613.html indicates that GLUT is available (and I do see it in the frameworks installed on my machine.)

mfram said:

It looks like the UI is written using GLUT and various libraries that depend on GLUT. Unfortunately, GLUT is not included with Mac. But it does appear there is a DarwinPorts version of it. So all is not lost. It may be possible to port this with enough effort.

Click to expand...

Yes it is. Add GLUT.framework. You'll probably need to change the includes from glut.h to GLUT/glut.h though.

Edit: Balls didn't read the post directly above mine .

Wow, I don't know how I missed that. Looks like it might be possible. The Fly program also uses PLIB. The website for that indicates that Mac OS X is "reasonably well supported". So that may take care of a large part of the stuff I couldn't compile since I didn't compile and build that whole library.

There was some Windows startup code in the program which would obviously have to be re-done. But it's looking like with correct libraries installed, it might not be too hard to get this thing working on Mac after all.