The latest PhysicsFS information and releases can be found at: http://icculus.org/physfs/ Building is (ahem) very easy. ALL PLATFORMS: Please understand your rights and mine: read the text file LICENSE.txt in the root of the source tree. If you can't abide by it, delete this source tree now. The license is extremely liberal, even to closed-source, commercial applications. If you've got Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org/) installed, you can run it without any command line arguments in the root of the source tree to generate the API reference (or build the "docs" target from your build system). This is optional. You can browse the API docs online here: http://icculus.org/physfs/docs/ UNIX: You will need CMake (http://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. Run "cmake ." in the root of the source directory to generate Makefiles. You can then run "ccmake ." and customize the build, but the defaults are probably okay. You can have CMake generate KDevelop project files if you prefer these. Run "make". PhysicsFS will now build. As root, run "make install". If you get sick of the library, run "xargs rm < install_manifest.txt" as root and it will remove all traces of the library from the system paths. Primary Unix development is done with GNU/Linux, but PhysicsFS is known to work out of the box with several flavors of Unix. It it doesn't work, patches to get it running can be sent to icculus@icculus.org. BeOS: Use the "Unix" instructions, above. The CMake port to BeOS is fairly new at the time of this writing, but it works. You can get it from bebits.com ... Windows: If building with CygWin, mingw32 or something else that uses the GNU toolchain, follow the Unix instructions, above. If you want to use Visual Studio, nmake, or the Platform SDK, you will need CMake (http://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. Point CMake at the CMakeLists.txt file in the root of the source directory and it will generate project files for you. PhysicsFS will only link directly against system libraries that have existed since Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51. If there's a newer API we want to use, we try to dynamically load it at runtime and fallback to a reasonable behaviour when we can't find it...this is used for Unicode support and locating user-specific directories, etc. PhysicsFS has not been tested on 64-bit Windows, but probably works. There is no 16-bit Windows support at all. Reports of success and problems can go to Ryan at icculus@icculus.org ... If someone is willing to maintain prebuilt PhysicsFS DLLs, I'd like to hear from you; send an email to icculus@icculus.org ... PocketPC/WindowsCE: Code exists for PocketPC support, and there are shipping titles that used PhysicsFS 1.0 on PocketPC...but it isn't tested in 2.0, and is probably broken with the new build system. Please send patches. MAC OS 8/9: Double-click on "CWProjects.sit" in the root of the source tree. This will unpack into a folder called "Mac Classic Support", which has CodeWarrior 6 project files. Point CodeWarrior at "physfs.mcp" in that new folder, and build. This will produce a "PhysicsFS" or "PhysicsFS Debug" shared library, depending on what configuration you chose to build. After building the lib, you can make sure it works by building the "test_physfs.mcp" project file, which will create "test_physfs" or "test_physfs Debug". These binaries are linked against the DLLs you built previously. PhysicsFS builds for classic Mac OS do not require CarbonLib...they use OS 8 (8.5?) APIs exclusively. If someone is willing to maintain prebuilt PhysicsFS Shared Libraries for the Mac, I'd like to hear from you; send an email to icculus@icculus.org. MAC OS X: You will need CMake (http://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. You can either generate a Unix makefile with CMake, or generate an Xcode project, whichever makes you more comfortable. PowerPC and Intel Macs should both be supported. If someone is willing to maintain prebuilt PhysicsFS Shared Libraries for Mac OS X, I'd like to hear from you; send an email to icculus@icculus.org. OS/2: You need EMX installed. I tried this on a stock Warp 4 install, no fixpaks. I used the latest EMX and patches (which are several years old now). You need to install link386.exe (Selective Install, "link object modules" option). Once EMX is installed correctly, unpack the source to PhysicsFS and run the script file "makeos2.cmd". I know this isn't ideal, but I wanted to have this build without users having to hunt down a "make" program (While several exist, EMX doesn't come with one). If someone wants to hack some REXX to make this a bit more picky about recompiling, I'll accept the patch. Modernizing this for post-EMX systems or OpenWatcom may be good solutions, too. Send patches. And port CMake. If someone is willing to maintain prebuilt PhysicsFS Shared Libraries for OS/2, I'd like to hear from you; send an email to icculus@icculus.org. OTHER PLATFORMS: Many Unix-like platforms might "just work" with CMake. Some of these platforms are known to have worked at one time, but have not been heavily tested, if tested at all. PhysicsFS is, as far as we know, 64-bit and byteorder clean, and is known to compile on several compilers across many platforms. To implement a new platform or archiver, please read the heavily-commented physfs_internal.h and look in the platform/ and archiver/ directories for examples. --ryan. (icculus@icculus.org)