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Bob Ippolito (@etrepum) on Haskell, Python, Erlang, JavaScript, etc.
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pygame 1.7.0 for Mac OS X 10.3

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Pygame is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the Python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system.

Although the official sdist tarball isn't cut yet, I've packaged what should be pygame 1.7.0 for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) users. It is available from pythonmac.org packages.

This installer ships with:

pygame:
Installed to /Library/Python2.3/
pygame headers:
Installed to /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/include/python2.3/
pygame examples and documentation:
Installed to /Developer/Python/pygame/
SDL with my AltiVec patches, SDL_mixer, SDL_ttf, SDL_image, smpeg:
Installed to /Library/Frameworks/

To use pygame, you will need PyObjC 1.2 or later, and you will probably want Numeric, PIL and PyOpenGL installed. All of these are also available from pythonmac.org packages.

The following improvements are especially relevant to Mac OS X:

  • Calls into nasty private Apple SPI (CPSEnableForegroundOperation) to grab GUI access if it doesn't already have it (read: no pythonw required)
  • Can now read the default font and icon out of any PEP 302 get_data compliant loader (read: py2app 0.1.8 can put pygame entirely in the site-packages.zip, and it works!).
  • Includes newer versions of all dependencies (it sure has been a long time since 1.6.0!)
  • Most surface operations should be significantly faster on G4 and G5 computers due to my AltiVec patches to SDL

As it has been quite a long time since the last release, there are pages full of bug fixes and feature enhancements. When pygame.org updates for the 1.7 release, check WhatsNew.

Note that I will not be making a Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) compatible release for Python 2.3. When Python 2.4.1 is out (and probably not until there is an official distribution of it), I may build a pygame release for that.

UPDATE: I built PyOpenGL, with some ugly hacking and lots of compiling. If there was an award for having a crappy build process, I would nominate PyOpenGL, twice.