The latest PhysicsFS information and releases can be found at: https://icculus.org/physfs/ Building is (ahem) very easy. ALL PLATFORMS: Please read the text file LICENSE.txt in the root of the source tree. The license is extremely liberal, even to closed-source, commercial applications. If you've got Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org/) installed, you can run it without any command line arguments in the root of the source tree to generate the API reference (or build the "docs" target from your build system). This is optional. You can browse the API docs online here: https://icculus.org/physfs/docs/ BUILD IT WITH YOUR OWN PROGRAM: If you don't care about formal packaging: just add everything in the "src" directory to whatever you use to build your program and compile it along with everything else, and you're done. It should compile with any reasonable ANSI C compiler, should build cleanly even with excessive compiler warnings enabled, needs no extra configuration, and allows static linking. WinRT and Haiku need C++ compilers for their system APIs, but if you aren't on these platforms and don't have a C++ compiler, don't build the .cpp files. Likewise: Apple platforms (macOS, iOS, etc) need an Objective-C compiler, but if you aren't on these platforms and don't have a Objective-C compiler, don't build the .m file. Everything you need is in the .c sources. If this all worked for your specific project, you can stop reading now. Unix: You will need CMake (https://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. Make a directory, wherever you like. This will be your build directory. Chdir to your build directory. Run "cmake /where/i/unpacked/physfs" to generate Makefiles. You can then run "ccmake ." and customize the build, but the defaults are probably okay. You can have CMake generate KDevelop or Ninja project files or whatever, if you prefer these. Run "make". PhysicsFS will now build. As root, run "make install". If you get sick of the library, run "make uninstall" as root and it will remove all traces of the library from the system paths. Once you are satisfied, you can delete the build directory. Primary Unix development is done with GNU/Linux, but PhysicsFS is known to work out of the box with several flavors of Unix. It it doesn't work, patches to get it running can be sent to icculus@icculus.org. Windows: If building with Cygwin, mingw32, MSYS, or something else that uses the GNU toolchain, follow the Unix instructions, above. If you want to use Visual Studio, nmake, or the Platform SDK, you will need CMake (https://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. Point CMake at the CMakeLists.txt file in the root of the source directory and hit the "Configure" button. After telling it what type of compiler you are targeting (Borland, Visual Studio, etc), CMake will process for while and then give you a list of options you can change (what archivers you want to support, etc). If you aren't sure, the defaults are probably fine. Hit the "Configure" button again, then "OK" once configuration has completed with options that match your liking. Now project files for your favorite programming environment will be generated for you in the directory you specified. Go there and use them to build PhysicsFS. PhysicsFS will only link directly against system libraries that have existed since Windows NT 3.51. If there's a newer API we want to use, we try to dynamically load it at runtime and fallback to a reasonable behaviour when we can't find it. Note that Windows 98 and later _should_ work if you use the Microsoft Layer for Unicode (UNICOWS.DLL) to provide some missing system APIs, but this is no longer tested as of PhysicsFS 2.1.0. PhysicsFS 2.0.x is known to work with Windows 95 without UNICOWS.DLL. PhysicsFS works on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. There is no 16-bit Windows support at all. Windows RT is covered below. Windows RT: Windows RT (Windows Phone, Windows Store, UWP) 8.0 and later are supported. Make sure you include both physfs_platform_windows.c _and_ physfs_platform_winrt.cpp in your build, and that the C++ file has "Consume Windows Runtime Extension" set to "Yes" in its Visual Studio properties (from the command line, you want to compile this file with the "/ZW" compiler switch). CMake can, in theory, generate a project file for WinRT if you pick a recent Visual Studio target, choose manual cross-compile options, and set the system name to "WindowsPhone" or "WindowsStore" and the correct OS version (8.0 or later). PocketPC/WindowsCE: Support for PocketPC was removed in PhysicsFS 2.1.0. This was known to work in the 1.0 releases, but wasn't tested in 2.0 and later. PhysicsFS should work on modern Windows Phones (see "Windows RT" section). macOS: You will need CMake (https://www.cmake.org/) 2.4 or later installed. You can either generate a Unix makefile with CMake, or generate an Xcode project, whichever makes you more comfortable. PowerPC and Intel Macs should both be supported. MAC OS 8/9 ("Mac OS Classic"): Classic Mac OS support has been dropped in PhysicsFS 2.0. Apple hasn't updated pre-OSX versions in more than a decade at this point, none of the hardware they've shipped will boot it for almost as many years, and finding developer tools for it is becoming almost impossible. As the switch to Intel hardware has removed the "Classic" emulation environment, it was time to remove support from PhysicsFS. That being said, the PhysicsFS 1.0 branch can still target back to Mac OS 8.5, so you can use that if you need support for this legacy OS. We still very much support modern macOS, though: see above. Emscripten: Use the "Unix" instructions, above. You can install the Emscripten SDK and use the extras/buildbot-emscripten.sh script to automate this for you. BeOS, Zeta, YellowTab: BeOS support was dropped in PhysicsFS 2.1.0. Consider installing Haiku, which we still support. Haiku: Use the "Unix" instructions, above. OS/2: OS/2 is known to work with OpenWatcom and GCC-based compilers. I couldn't get an OS/2 port of CMake to generate OpenWatcom project files (although it should be able to do that in theory), it should be able to do Unix Makefiles with GCC. It might be easier to just compile PhysicsFS along with the rest of your project on this platform. OTHER PLATFORMS: Many Unix-like platforms might "just work" with CMake. Some of these platforms are known to have worked at one time, but have not been heavily tested, if tested at all. PhysicsFS is, as far as we know, 64-bit and byteorder clean, and is known to compile on several compilers across many platforms. To implement a new platform or archiver, please read the heavily-commented physfs_internal.h and look at the physfs_platform_* and physfs_archiver_* source files for examples. --ryan. (icculus@icculus.org)