What would it take to get lwjgl ready for the Intel-Macs?

[elias4444]

I'm just curious... I'm mulling over the possibility of buying an iMac for my next computer. If I were to get an Intel-based iMac, would I simply be able to recompile the lwjgl binaries to get it to work? Would that be helpful to lwjgl in general if someone had an intel-iMac to do that?

Please let me know.

[Matzon]

The plan is to allow to simply recompile. It would great if we had access to someone knowledgable with an Intel-Mac who could compile and verify that everything works as expected.
Oddlabs have considered buying one too, perhaps with support from the LWJGL funds, however we've decided for now that we will stall a bit to see if we can do without - and just let people with an Intel/Mac box test for us.
Apparently JNI code won't work through Rosetta.

[elias]

It would be very helpful to have an intel mac user within reach I've committed some changes to accomodate intel macs, and I'm pleased to inform you that Tribal Trouble runs on at least one intel iMac, which means that LWJGL in general should work fine on those.

Regarding Rosetta: Its purpose is to translate PPC code into i386 code, but this doesn't work for JNI libraries as described here:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2005/qa1295.html

So the changes I made was to compile two versions of the mac natives, liblwjgl.jnilib and liblwjgl-legacy.jnilib. The former is a Mac OS X 10.4 compatible universal binary, loaded on 10.4 macs (PPC and intels). The latter is an ordinary PPC compiled binary for 10.3 and 10.2 compatibility. Two binaries are needed, since afaik you can't make an universal binary that works on 10.3.8 and below (10.3.9 actually have some support for 10.4 binaries). This is caused by the switch to gcc 4 in 10.4 and not the intel mac switch itself.

- elias