Compiling ScummVM/Visual Studio

Compiling ScummVM with Visual Studio 2003/2005 under Windows

Compiling ScummVM under Windows is not an awfully hard task, however there are some things that don't just work out of the box

Things needed

Visual Studio 2005

There exist several versions of Visual Studio 2005. A feature comparison can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/default.aspx

You can obtain the free Express version of VS2005 here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx

Libraries needed

• SDL 1.2.

You need the file SDL-devel-1.2.11-VC6.zip (1.2.11 is the latest version at this time)

• NASM

• libogg and libvorbis for OGG support

Note that the libraries included in the "vorbis" package won't work. You need libogg and libvorbis, not vorbis

• libmad for MP3 support

• libmpeg2 for MPEG-2 support

Get the latest mpeg2dec release from this page, libmpeg2 is included there

• zlib. You need the latest zlib compiled DLL

If you wish to compile zlib statically in ScummVM (so that zlib1.dll is not needed), you'll also need the zlib source code. If you wish to compile ScummVM 0.8.0 or earlier with zlib support, you'll need the zlib source as well as crtdll.lib.

Building the libraries

Now, we need to compile the required libraries.

Note that you'll need to build all libraries with the same configuration settings (debug or release). If you don't need a specific library, you can remove it from your build by going to Project->Properties, Configuration Properties->C/C++->Preprocessor and remove the "USE_XXX" directive for that library from there. For example, to remove OGG support, remove the USE_VORBIS directive

A note about VS2005

If you're building the libraries with VS2005, you will get a lot of deprecation warnings. These are normal and nothing to worry about, they're just Microsoft's way of saying "This is a bad code practice. Use this instead". It's not easy to turn these off without several modifications to the code, so just ignore them.

Read more here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/05/SafeCandC/

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=361433

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/07/348437.aspx

If you do wish to make them disappear, you need to include on top the main function of each library, before the includes, the following lines:

 #if (_MSC_VER >= 1400) /* VC8+ (VS2005) */
 #pragma warning(disable : 4996) /* Disable all deprecation warnings */ 
 #endif /* VC8+ (VS2005) */

NASM

First of all, we need nasm. So unzip the nasm archive in a directory, copy "nasmw.exe" to "nasm.exe" (because some projects call one and others call the other) and include it in the executable path of VS. To do this, go to Tools->Options->Projects and solutions->VC++ directories. Select "Executable files" from the top right and include the directory where you unzipped nasm into.

SDL

SDL is already compiled and needs no further changes, so we can skip the compilation step for it

zlib

zlib is already compiled, so we can skip the compilation step for it

If you wish to compile zlib statically into ScummVM (and thus, remove the zlib1.dll dependency), you'll also need the zlib source. Go into the projects directory in the zlib source and open the solution there. For each of the 3 projects in the solution (example, minigzip and zlib) you need to right-click it in the solution explorer and go to properties. Then, go to Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation and change the Runtime library from "Multi-Threaded DLL (/MD)" to "Multi-Threaded (/MT)", otherwise you'll get a lot of unresolved externals when you try to build ScummVM and the compilation will fail. When you've changed all three projects, compile the solution using the LIB release configuration. Then, open the ScummVM solution and go to Project->Properties, Linker->Input and change the "zldll.lib" directive to "zlib.lib".

For ScummVM 0.8.0 or earlier, you'll also need zlibwapi. Go in the contrib\vstudio\vs8 directory (or vs7 if you're using VS2003), unzip crtdll.lib from the zip you downloaded earlier in the directory and compile zlibvc. This is a required library up to the stable 0.8.0 release, but it's not required anymore in the latest CVS version

libogg

Compile this first, as many other libraries need it. Go to the win32 directory and build the ogg solution in there. DON'T compile the solution in the VS2003 directory, as this produces "libogg.lib" instead of "ogg.lib". A simple rename might work, though

libvorbis

Before compiling this, include the libogg include and library paths in VS. To do this, go to Tools->Options->Projects and solutions->VC++ directories and include the include directory of libogg as well as the directory with the compiled ogg library

mpeg2dec

After you compile this one, go to its include directory, create a folder "mpeg2dec" in there and copy all files from the include folder in this subfolder. So you should end up with 2 directories, "include" and "include\mpeg2dec" with the same files. This is needed, as ScummVM includes files from the "mpeg2dec" directory

libmad

To compile this, you need to remove all the "_CRTRESTRICT" directives from the code, as VS doesn't understand this directive

FLAC

Not a necessary library, so you may skip this one. If you do wish to include it, open its solution and compile the libFLAC_static project.

Adding all libraries to Visual Studio

Now that we got all libraries compiled, we go to Tools->Options->Projects and solutions->VC++ directories.

In the executable files section, make sure that the path to nasm is included and that nasmw.exe in that folder has been copied to nasm.exe. Failure to do that will give you an error in VS (a custom building step has returned an error)

In the include files section, make sure that the include folders for libogg, libvorbis, libmad, zlib, mpeg2dec and SDL are in the list. If you need FLAC, include the FLAC include folder in the list too

In the library files section, make sure that the static libraries for vorbis, vorbisfile, libogg, zlib, mpeg2dec, libmad and SDL are included. If you're building 0.8.0 final or earlier, include the release folder of zlibdll too (in the zlib source folder, contrib\vstudio\vc8\x86\zlibdllrelease). If you need FLAC, include the FLAC libraries folder too

Finally, if you need to compile ScummVM with FLAC support, go to Configuration Properties->C/C++->Preprocessor and add "USE_FLAC" in the Preprocessor Definitions field. Also, go to linker->input and add "libflac_static.lib" in the Additional Dependencies field.

Before compiling

Open the solution file in dists\vc8 (or vc7 if you're using VS2003)

Before compiling, open the file sound\softsynth\ym2612.cpp in the scummvm directory with VS and save it as unicode. To do this, go to File->Save as and in the save button, click the small arrow next to it and select "Save with encoding" and select "UTF8" from the list. The reason for this step is that this file contains Japanese characters, so VS refuses to compile the project if it's not saved as unicode

After compiling, don't forget to copy "sdl.dll" in the release and debug directories where scummvm.exe is located. If you haven't compiled zlib statically into ScummVM and have included zlib support, you'll need to copy "zlib1.dll" in the same directory as scummvm.exe as well

Ready to go!

OK this should be all of it (thankfully), so you should be good to go.

Note that whenever you get a new release from the scummvm website, you need to follow the steps in the "before compiling" section to compile scummvm