Do you know what is Adobe Alchemy?

Alchemy allows programmers to compile C and C++ scripts into SWC files to make them run on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5. In other words, you can compile the hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ project to use them in Flash.

Some examples of existing C libraries compiled with Alchemy are Doom Triple Pack and World Construction Kit. And it’s free!!

The other side of the coin is still in beta (Adobe calls it “prerelease software”), not supported by Adobe, and not that user friendly.

That’s why I am writing this guide to have Alchemy running on your Mac. I’m starting with a Mac because if you find this guide difficult, be prepared… Windows installation is even worse. Anyway, let’s start:

Download everything you need

Before you start playing with Alchemy, there are some free softwares to download.

Xcode. It’s the developer tool for for Mac OSX and you will need to register to download it. Simply install it following the instruction it will give you.

Alchemy Toolkit for Mac OSX, that’s Alchemy itself. Unzip the entire folder in the root directory of your hard drive. Usually it’s called Macintosh HD.

Adobe Flex SDK, used to produce the final SWC. I wouldn’t use Nightly Builds. Unzip this package in the root directory of your hard drive, just like you made with Alchemy.

Also try to call the folders in a way easy to remember, such as flex and alchemy. This is how should it be your download window:

And this is what you should see in your finder:

Using Terminal

I told you it wasn’t user friendly… so we have to open Terminal and enter some text commands.

“Open” alchemy folder…

and execute config file

You should see something like this:

Don’t worry if you get a warning like this:

as it will be corrected later.

Now edit adl file in your flex/bin folder. Find this line:

and assuming your Flex folder is called flex, change with:

Return to Terminal and enter the following commands, assuming you are using flex and alchemy folder names:

Finally turn on alchemy:

Enter in a folder with an example source code:

and compile the C source code into an SWC:

You should see something like this:

And you should see a file called stringecho_triqui.swc in your stringecho folder, like in this picture:

Congratulations! You just compiled your first C code into a SWC with Alchemy.

Next time, I’ll show you what to do with it.