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 | Hardware Requirements for Running PLIBTo do good 3D graphics, you'll need an OpenGL-compatible 3D graphics
accellerator that your operating system supports.  Most systems can
run OpenGL in software only - but performance is so poor as to be
unusable in the kinds of application for which PLIB is intended.
If you want to hear sound effects and music, you'll obviously
need a sound card and some speakers or headphones.
 Software Requirements for Running PLIBThe PLIB team works hard to minimise our dependance on other
libraries to make it easy for end-users to install application
software without having to visit dozens of web sites to collect
the libraries they need.
3D/2D Graphics: OpenGL. If you aren't already set up to
    run OpenGL, you should check:
     
     The OpenGL ARB site.
     Or download Mesa
         (which is an excellent OpenGL clone by Brian Paul).
     If you are a Linux user, you may wish to check the
         Linux3D Site.
     If you are a Windoze or Macintosh user, you should have
         had a copy of OpenGL delivered with your operating
         system.
    Windowing: From version 1.8.0, PLIB itself is completely independent of 
    any other windowing library.  However, some of the demo and example
    programs use freeglut (or at a
    pinch: 
    the original
    GLUT (GL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard).
    freeglut
    works very well with PLIB applications and is maintained by
    many of the same people - so there is good continuity.
    It's perfectly possible to write PLIB programs that don't use
    either GLUT or freeglut - for example, you can use PLIB with 
    SDL).
 How Portable is PLIB?VERY!
 All flavors of Linux are supported - on any CPU platform that
     supports Xfree86 and OpenGL.
 All flavors of Win32 are
     supported, using either MSVC++ or CygWin for compilation.
     Theoretically you could use Borland C++ also, but since there is little
     user base these days, the necessary 'project' files to build PLIB
     under Borland's IDE tend to get outdated.
 Most other UNIX-like systems (at least BSD, IRIX, Solaris, OS-X) providing
     they support X-windows.
 MacOS-X is also reasonably well supported.
 MacOS-9 runs everything except the joystick library.  However, it's getting
     hard to find people to test this port - so it may have problems by the time
     you come to use it.
 Support for BeOS is problematic - for some reason, people who are prepared
     to help out with porting PLIB to BeOS are hard to find. However, since
     BeOS (I'm told) has compatibility with X, OpenGL and OSS, it should
     be easy to port to and may just work 'out of the box'.
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