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Hardware Requirements for Running PLIB
To do good 3D graphics, you'll need an OpenGL-compatible 3D graphics
accellerator that your operating system supports. Most systems can
run OpenGL in software only - but performance is so poor as to be
unusable in the kinds of application for which PLIB is intended.
If you want to hear sound effects and music, you'll obviously
need a sound card and some speakers or headphones.
Software Requirements for Running PLIB
The PLIB team works hard to minimise our dependance on other
libraries to make it easy for end-users to install application
software without having to visit dozens of web sites to collect
the libraries they need.
- 3D/2D Graphics: OpenGL. If you aren't already set up to
run OpenGL, you should check:
- The OpenGL ARB site.
- Or download Mesa
(which is an excellent OpenGL clone by Brian Paul).
- If you are a Linux user, you may wish to check the
Linux3D Site.
- If you are a Windoze or Macintosh user, you should have
had a copy of OpenGL delivered with your operating
system.
- Windowing: From version 1.8.0, PLIB itself is completely independent of
any other windowing library. However, some of the demo and example
programs use freeglut (or at a
pinch:
the original
GLUT (GL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard).
freeglut
works very well with PLIB applications and is maintained by
many of the same people - so there is good continuity.
It's perfectly possible to write PLIB programs that don't use
either GLUT or freeglut - for example, you can use PLIB with
SDL).
How Portable is PLIB?
VERY!
- All flavors of Linux are supported - on any CPU platform that
supports Xfree86 and OpenGL.
- All flavors of Win32 are
supported, using either MSVC++ or CygWin for compilation.
Theoretically you could use Borland C++ also, but since there is little
user base these days, the necessary 'project' files to build PLIB
under Borland's IDE tend to get outdated.
- Most other UNIX-like systems (at least BSD, IRIX, Solaris, OS-X) providing
they support X-windows.
- MacOS-X is also reasonably well supported.
- MacOS-9 runs everything except the joystick library. However, it's getting
hard to find people to test this port - so it may have problems by the time
you come to use it.
- Support for BeOS is problematic - for some reason, people who are prepared
to help out with porting PLIB to BeOS are hard to find. However, since
BeOS (I'm told) has compatibility with X, OpenGL and OSS, it should
be easy to port to and may just work 'out of the box'.
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