Trying to install SDL Perl on Windows 10, problems with "make" (and "dmake" and "gmake") - perl

Question

I am using Windows 10 and Strawberry Perl. I found this nice tutorial on building a 3D engine in Perl. Which requires SDL. For a couple of days I've been trying to install it, but it doesn't work. First I tried via CPAN, no success. No I am trying manually, but I am getting error messages when using "make". If I type "perl -V:make" it says I should use "dmake". If I do so, there's a dmake warning, telling me to use gmake instead. If I do that, there's the following message:
"to undefined at C:/Perl64/site/lib/ExtUtils/Install.pm line 1199. gmake: *** [Makefile:942: pm_to_blib] Error 2"
Any suggestions how to fix this? Or is there an easy (easier) way to install SDL?

Answer 1

It seems like the Perl SDL module uses SDL version 1.2.14, whereas the documentation says
The best course of action is to move to SDL 2.0 or later as quickly as
possible
So, I would recommend looking at the Python bindings PySDL2 instead. The following worked for me on Windows 10:
Downloaded Python 3.8 from here:
https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.2/python-3.8.2-amd64.exe
Then added the following to the User enviroment variables for "Path" (NOTE: at the beginning, not at the end):
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\Scripts
Then, from the command prompt install pysdl2:
>pip install pysdl2
Collecting pysdl2
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/60/ba/ddb48261848874eeb3d54963edbf3c74fff86499746aeb23151f123953bb/PySDL2-0.9.7-py3-none-any.whl (541kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 542kB 2.2MB/s
Installing collected packages: pysdl2
Successfully installed pysdl2-0.9.7
>pip install pysdl2-dll
Collecting pysdl2-dll
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/01/37/f9aa5472fb85ce94507c69110916133ad29b650d2bf277de2cce37d7ad7d/pysdl2_dll-2.0.12-py2.py3-none-win_amd64.whl (2.5MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 2.5MB 3.2MB/s
Installing collected packages: pysdl2-dll
Successfully installed pysdl2-dll-2.0.12
Then, add a new User environment variable PYTHONPATH with value:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\Lib\site-packages
Close the command prompt, and reopen a new one to update the environment variables. Then I created a test Python script:
import sys
import sdl2.ext
resource_dir=r'C:\Users\hakon\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\Lib\site-packages\sdl2\examples'
RESOURCES = sdl2.ext.Resources(resource_dir, "resources")
sdl2.ext.init()
window = sdl2.ext.Window("Hello World!", size=(640, 480))
window.show()
factory = sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory(sdl2.ext.SOFTWARE)
sprite = factory.from_image(RESOURCES.get_path("hello.bmp"))
spriterenderer = factory.create_sprite_render_system(window)
spriterenderer.render(sprite)
processor = sdl2.ext.TestEventProcessor()
processor.run(window)
sdl2.ext.quit()
and finally run it from the command prompt:
> python test.py