This miniLD restricts games to the usage of a game engine that was written by the hosts. To use it on MacOSX a few tweaks are needed. First get the source here and then the combined diff here.

Next extract the souce somewhere. Because, zip apparently doesn't play well with permissions, I had to do a "chmod -R 755" on the extracted dir. Once that is done, move the combined diff to root of the extracted directory and patch.

$ unzip retro-src.zip

$ chmod -R 755 retro-src

$ mv /path/to/combinedDiff retro-src

$ cd retro-src

$ patch -p0 < combinedDiff

Now one can compile. The libraries one needs are libsdl, libsdl_image, libsdl_mixer and Lua 5.1. The build system is written in scons. All these are available from MacPorts and the package names match the names listed except Lua which is simply lua.

To compile execute 'scons' in the root directory to build the retro engine with lua scripting. If one wishes to use the c api, then go into the example-c dir to see an example SConstruct file. To make sure everything is playing well, then execute 'scons -f Scontruct-C' and run retro-c and one should see a window pop up with just a black background.

There is one known issue on the Mac. That being that loadMusic in Lua Scripting doesn't work as advertised. If one uses it, ogg's have been used successfully, but not the xm that the Lua example comes with, nor a tested mp3. The results were freezing with the mp3 and crashing with the xm:

$ ../retro

0

Couldn't load music Shroom.xm. Exiting.

$