A reader asked me how to setup SDL2 for Windows given recent changes in SDL2. Specifically the files and libsdl projects have been moved from the libsdl.org website to GitHub. You can easily find SDL2 Image, Mixer, TTF etc.

However it can still be quite daunting setting up Visual Studio for SDL2. You have to download the specific files, then configure the project properties to specify the include paths for header files and then the lib files, both the path to them and identify the ones you want to use.

As I’m on my new PC, I bit the bullet and went through the process of setting it up. It took just over an hour to configure it.  I’ve put it into a PDF that’s a couple of pages long.

So the game works but only after I disabled the sound code; it was failing in the call to Mix_OpenAudio(). I think recent work on the SDL Mixer needs some work on my part. I need to sit down and look at the SDL Mixer page and figure out what’s failing. Once that’s done, I’ll update the files.

I then spent a day wrestling with the compiler trying to access this in those methods that used this and in the end found it easier to make it into its own class and had an instance of it in each of the classes. I.e. using composition rather than inheritance.

Rewriting in C++ made things like saving high scores to disk and reloading a bit simpler using C++ strings.  Now I just have to get my main PC up and running and then polish the code and publish it on GitHub.

Asteroids was the first full arcade game I ever wrote in C. Asteroids in C# takes things to a whole new level.  The solution contains 12 projects in all: Three Blazor projects, a WinForms version, a WPF version, a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and a Xamarin Android Forms version (shown).

You can compile and run any of the projects though you will need to install and setup a suitable SDK and emulated (or a real device) for the Android.

Written by Howard Uman and ported by Ernie Salazar, this is a wireframe asteroids, more true to the original than my own raster version. Out of curiosity, I created an Android 9.0 emulator (I don’t have a recent Android phone) and compiled then deployed it to the emulator. The screenshot is grabbed directly from the emulator which has a less than ideal screen ratio. This would work better on a tablet.

The structure of the C# Solution is interesting. All of the game code is in the Base project. All of the other platforms just host the main game window. The game uses the SkiaSharp graphics framework for Android Forms.

This is a very nice open source project and an excellent way to see how Blazor works in both Wasm and Server mode, not to mention the Android, WinForms/WPF and UWP versions.

I have an interest in Blazor which lets you write C# code that runs in the browser very easily.  With a bit of workj, this should be runnable on a Linux webserver as well. Something for me to try…