In the following article, I will describe how I install BlitzMax on OS X Leopard from the official Blitz Research Limited Subversion (short: SVN) repositories. According to Wikipedia, “a repository is a place where data or specimens are stored and maintained for future retrieval.” The repository that we are interested in here is the storage where the BRL developers store their most recent versions of the BlitzMax development package. It contains the latest bug fixes and newest features, and it is much more frequently updated than official BlitzMax releases are shipped. So there are very good reasons to prefer SVN ‘checkouts’ over the regular distribution.

Since no BlitzMax installation is complete without Bruce A. “Brucey” Henderson’s popular collection of BlitzMax modules, we will also those via SVN from the Google Code archive. Unfortunately, not all of his great modules have made it to the Google Code archives yet, so you should also check his webpage for the remaining modules. The URL is http://www.brucey.net/programming/blitz/index.php.

Before we start, you need to either download and install Apple’s Xcode developer tools from developer.apple.com or you install the version that is on the OS X Leopard installation DVD.

You will also need a software tool called “SCPlugin” from Tigris.org. SCPlugin is for the Mac what TortoiseSVN is for Microsoft Windows: A GUI front-end to Subversion that integrates into Finder’s context menus (where TortoiseSVN does the same in Windows Explorer).

SCPlugin installation files can be downloaded from the project’s “documents & files” page. The URL is http://scplugin.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList.

Once SCPlugin is installed, create an empty folder for your BlitzMax installation. I always name my folder “BlitzMax” and put it in the /Applications folder.

Then, right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the new BlitzMax folder and enter the “More” submenu, select “Subversion” and then “Checkout”. This will lead to this dialog window:

In “Repository URL:”, provide the full URL to the main BRL development repository. This URL is:

• http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/main

You will also need to provide the credentials that BRL has assigned to your user account with them. The very same username and password that you use for downloading official product releases or that you use to access the BRL discussion forum will also work here. Do not use anonymous access for the SVN repository, it won’t work.

Once you have entered your credentials, click on “Checkout”. When everything works well, you will see a screen like this:

Confirm it with clicking on “OK”.

This was only the beginning, and there are more folders in the repository that you need to checkout to complete your BlitzMax installation. Namely, these are the folders “bin”, “lib”, “samples” and, if you have purchased a license for it as well, MaxGUI.Depending on the CPU of your Mac, you will either need to checkout the PowerPC or the Intel version of BlitzMax.

The PowerPC versions are stored here:
http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/macos_ppc/bin
http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/macos_ppc/lib

The Intel versions are located here:

http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/macos_x86/bin
http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/macos_x86/lib

To checkout the “lib” folder of your BlitzMax installation, right-click (or Ctrl-click) on your BlitzMax folder again and once more go to “More/Subversion/Checkout”.

Enter the URL to the lib folder matching your CPU architecture and make sure that you checkout the files to a subfolder named “lib”. In our example, the files will be stored in /Applications/BlitzMax/lib. Again, you also have to enter your BRL username and password.

Now do the same for the “bin” folder. Following our example, you will want to store the files to /Applications/BlitzMax/bin.

Then, you might want to checkout the sample games and code that comes with BlitzMax. Checkout http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/blitzmax/dev/samples to /Applications/BlitzMax/samples.
If you own MaxGUI, you want to check it out from http://blitzbasic.com:81/svn/maxgui/dev/maxgui.mod to /Applications/BlitzMax/mod/maxgui.mod as shown in this dialog:

Now Brucey’s modules are checked out from http://maxmods.googlecode.com/svn/trunk to /Applications/BlitzMax/mod/bah.mod. And this time, we use anonymous access:

This will also checkout at least two trouble makers: The MySQL module and a module names xlwriter.mod. The MySQL module won’t compile unless you install the header files from a MySQL installation. If you don’t have those and if you don’t necessarily want to access a MySQL database from a BlitzMax application, my advice is to delete the folder dbmysql.mod in /Applications/BlitzMax/mod/bah.mod. xlwriter.mod won’t work without a wxMax installation; for now, I also recommend deleting the the xlwriter.mod folder.

I will not go into the installation of Brucey’s exhaustive wxMax module, which at the time of this writing has not yet officially reached release status, but still is in late beta stage. You will find more details on the official Google Code page. But in any case, the URL to the wxMax.mod SVN repository is http://wxmax.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/wx.mod. Again, anonymous access will do. But in order to get it to work, you will have to download a collection of wxWidgets files and headers. Really, follow the official instructions on http://code.google.com/p/wxmax/wiki/SetupAndInstallation.

To finalize the setup from SVN and to get BlitzMax working, open a Terminal window (the OS X terminal application is in /Applications/Utilities) and type the following commands:

cd /Applications/BlitzMax/bin
./bmk makemods

This will build all modules that you’ve just downloaded from the repository. It is a long procedure and will take a while, but it is a mandatory step - BlitzMax won’t work without it.
If you are new to the command prompt, or shell, as it’s usually called in the Unix-world: You can use auto-completion by pressing that TAB key. For example, if you type in cd /App and press TAB, it will auto-complete to cd /Applications. Then you can add /Bli and press TAB again and you will see cd /Applications/BlitzMax in the command line. This feature can safe you a lot of typing.

You will also want to build the documentation. Still in Terminal and in the /Applications/BlitzMax/bin directory, type in the following command:

./docmods

Now there is one culprit left for us to install: MaxIDE. The problem here is that no MaxIDE application binary is stored in the repository (only the source code), so we have to get it from somewhere else. The recommended procedure is to copy it from an existing BlitzMax installation. That certainly is a valid and easy option, but we will compile an own version from the checked out source code instead.

In Terminal, type these commands:

cd /Applications/BlitzMax/src/maxide
../../bin/bmk makeapp -t gui maxide.bmx

This will create an application bundle with the name maxide.app. You can close Terminal now and open Finder. Move maxide.app from /Applications/BlitzMax/src/maxide to /Applications/BlitzMax. For convenience, you should also create a link in the dock for MaxIDE by simply dragging its application icon from Finder to the dock. Launch MaxIDE. Strangely enough, it will want to rebuild the documentation on the first start. Simply confirm this request.

Congratulations, that’s it! You now have a working BlitzMax installation from the SVN repositories!

To keep the installation updated, you can simply right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the folders and select “More/Subversion Update”.

Maybe I was having a little bit too much on my hands in the last days, but I’ve re-installed Vista Ultimate Edition 32 Bit SP1 on a 160 GB disk on my Mac Pro (which is what people nowadays call ‘running Windows in BootCamp’).

My Mac Pro has 8 GB RAM, and that’s too much for a 32 Bit OS; Vista correctly reports that there are 8 GB in the system, but it also says that only two GB memory are available for applications. I could get myself a 64 Bit version of Vista, but the problem with that is that Apple only provides 64 Bit Windows drivers for the second generation Mac Pros, and mine is a first generation model. I’ve finally reached the age where I want my computers to ‘just work’, so I don’t want to go to that uncharted territory anymore.

It’s already problematic enough to get Apple’s latest software running on officially supported systems. For example, I did not manage to install the BootCamp 2.1 drivers update - Apple’s setup file just does not work on a German Vista version (with the display language set to English). A quick research on Google told me that I am not the only one with that issue, and it seems that Apple just does not care enough to fix this. Anyway. Everything runs well enough with the original BootCamp drivers that are being shipped with Leopard. Did I say ‘well enough’? Well, the truth is that Vista with SP1 runs snappier on the Mac Pro than Leopard 10.5.4; the Microsoft system is very responsive and fun to use on this machine.

But what was the reason why I installed Vista in the first place? Right: Games.

I hadn’t played Far Cry in quite a while, so I’ve installed it with the 1.40 32-Bit patch. Not caring much for the recommended system settings that the game suggested, I cranked up everything to the maximum: 1920×1200 resolution, all details set as high as possible.

At first, I had a problem with the mouse in Far Cry - it only worked in the menus, but not in the game itself. Googling helped immediately: In the game’s control settings, you have to select “default”, apply, quit Far Cry, start it again - and voilá, the mouse now also works in the game!

What can I tell you about the game experience? Well, I currently only have two GeForce GT 7300 graphic cards in the Mac, but Far Cry runs extremely smooth on my configuration - no lags, delays, frame drops, hiccups, nothing. I’d never seen the game on that detail level, so it was an all new experience for me. I knew that there would be fish in the water on high details settings, and they really look nice. But I didn’t know that there were also pigs, parrots, dragonflies, fireflies and flocks of other birds flying through the game world. Far Cry’s fauna really is amazing on a powerful enough computer.

But talking about birds, here’s a nice one from last night’s gaming session: There’s a mercenary patrolling on a wooden bridge that I need to cross. From a long distance, I grab my sniper rifle and take the guy in my sights. The moment I pull the trigger, a bird crosses the path of the bullet. The merc remains unharmed, but through my scope I see white feathers everywhere. Oops.

I’m writing this because I once again stumbled over some blogs of technophile folks who pride themselves with having successfully jailbroken Apple’s iPhone.

People buy iPhones because they somehow fell in love with that little device that could be out of a Star Trek movie. Then they quickly discover that the iPhone is just a pretty looking device that’s significantly crippled - you cannot use it with the phone provider of your choice and you cannot install software on it that did not get Apple’s blessing. For example, there still is no legal way to install Python on the iPhone, although a Python interpreter for it exists. You need to jailbreak the iPhone to do all these things, which is a fancy word for hacking it.

Now many people still buy iPhones, forfeit their warranty and illegally jailbreak their new phone. Only to do something they should have been able to do in the first place: Use the phone with a phone provider of their choice - or maybe just use the phone in a country where it is not yet sold - and install software on without having to comply with Apple’s vendor lock-in sales strategies.

Somehow, remotely, this kind of remembers me of the situation with DVD playback on GNU/Linux systems: People hacked the DVD encryption not to make illegal copies of their DVDs, but to watch them on their operating system of choice. Absurd as it sounds, but customers had to do something illegal to obtain their legal rights.

Copyright laws in general have become consumer hostile to an almost ridiculous degree, and it’s copyright laws that enable Apple to create mechanisms to completely control what their customers can do with their products and enforce them by law. How can the interests of a company with a few thousand employees weigh more than the interest of more than ten million customers who have bought their shiny mobile phone?

How can it be legal that the movie industry sells you DVDs but does not allow you to watch them with free software?

How can it be legal that Apple sells you an iPhone but tells you what carrier to use with it and what software you are allowed to install on a device that is a mobile computer? What would you ask Microsoft if they sold you a notebook on which you could only install software that you’ve bought from a Microsoft store? (Not that their Xbox 360 works any differently, by the way.)

The sad truth is that the lobbies to which those companies belong have managed to purchase themselves laws that legalize all their monopolistic strategies.

Jailbreaking these devices is the wrong answer that we consumers can give those companies.

The only right answer is not to buy such crippled hardware.

But to make your day and to contradict myself here: I own an Xbox 360 and an iPod Touch.

I am fully okay with the Xbox and when I bought it, I was fully aware of the fact that it was a DRM fortress. But I only use it for gaming and I do not pirate software. The Xbox 360 is a great deal for what I have purchased her and I do not mind her copy protection mechanisms in the least. It’s a gaming device, and I understand the need of the companies for a certain degree of copy protection. I’ve once worked for a software company that went bankrupt, and until today you can still download our software from file sharing networks. When my employer went bust, I’ve had to live off my credit card for three months before I saw my last salary. That wasn’t funny and it made me think a lot about software piracy (and poor management, but that is a different story).

I am not okay with the restrictions Apple has put on the iPod Touch. There simply is no excuse for why I cannot install any software that I want on it, and there certainly is no excuse for why I can only purchase software from Apple’s AppStore for that device. Monopoly is the word for this situation, and Apple is misusing its position to not even let a competition come into existence.

I had bought the iPod Touch when it was clear that Apple would introduce a software developer kit for it - and in my naive interpretation for me that meant that Apple was going to open the device. But they haven’t.

So did I buy the iPod Touch under a wrong assumption? Obviously yes. I was not expecting to be treated by this company like I was an underage retard whose only right to exist is to pour some money into Apple’s pockets.

Besides being so closed that I can only install software from Apple’s AppStore, the iPod Touch - like the iPhone - is also a device that does not even let me copy my DRM-free-music files to whatever other device or computer as I see fit.

Which part of my files are DRM-free is Apple not understanding here?

And which part of IT’S NONE OF APPLE’S FUCKING BUSINESS WHAT I DO WITH MY OWN DRM-FREE FILES are they also not willing to understand?

I could only copy files that I’ve bought from their iTunes store, and then it would not even matter if they were DRM-free or not.

But without having paid an Apple tax, I cannot do what’s my legal right to do.

If the word democracy was worth the ink and paper that were used to write it down, (copyright) laws would protect the consumers, not the corporations.