Pygame for the brave and adventurous

Pygame has some trouble running on certian OS X configurations, and tends to do some funny things on retina macs, this is a quick run-down of installing pygame from source.

This assumes a working knowledge of the terminal.

We are going to use some handy software to get pygame installed:

• homebrew a package manager for OSX. quite simply it lets us install software and tools from the terminal
• pip a package manager for python, its used to install lots of useful python libraries.

First we need homebrew, so pop the command from the site —

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

— into your terminal and follow the prompts.

Next we need pip, following the linked site is probably a good idea, but the gist is to download this file and run: python get-pip.py

In order to get all the right versions of pygame and it’s dependencies we need a little program called mercurial, used for managing source code, so run: brew install mercurial

Next we need to install some dependencies for pygame:

brew install sdl sdl_image sdl_mixer sdl_ttf smpeg portmidi

And finally pygame itself:

sudo pip install hg+http://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame

The sudo command tells the system that we want to make changes as a kind of “super-administrator”, and is needed for pip to install things.

And with that everything should work fine.