Over the past few weeks my interest in Adobes Lab project Alchemy has been growing and growing. The main spark was set after playing around a little bit with the FLARToolkit alchemy branch and noticing much faster results. I had to figure out why it worked so much quicker and what made it tick. After a few days of pondering I headed over to the adobe labs site and started reading all of the information that they could offer. I ran into a few problems along the way with the install process and I could not find a lot of information on the internet that was very helpful, so I decided that I would post about it incase anybody else may be in the same position. Below is the process I used to install adobe alchemy on my mac book pro with a clean os x 10.6 install(also works with 10.5), the process is very similar for window but you will need to install cygwin.

1. Download the Alchemy Tool kit package for mac OS X
2. Download version latest of the adobe Flex SDK
3. Unzip the Alchemy Tool kit and rename the folder to “alchemy”
4. Move the alchemy folder to the root directory of your hard drive. Please make sure this is your hard drive root and not your user home folder.
5. Unzip the Flex SDK, rename the folder to flex_sdk
6. Move the flex folder to the root directory of your hard drive. Please make sure this is your hard drive root and not your user home folder.
7. 7) Now is where we get to the fun stuff. Open up a terminal window and navigate to the alchemy folder

1	cd /alchemy/

8. Once inside the alchemy directory run the configuration file “config”

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./config

9. While you are still inside of terminal, you should turn on the viewing of hidden files with in finder. You will also need to restart finder.

1 2	defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES killall Finder

10. You will now need to go into the alchemy directory and open up the alchemy-setup file. I used text-mate to do this
11. Edit line 22 of the file to point to the adl file in your flex_sdk/bin directory. It should look like:

1	export ADL=/flex_sdk/bin/adl

12. Goto to your hard drive root and and open up the .etc folder. You will need to open up the bashrc file inside
13. Add the text below to your bashrc file:

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#adobe alchemy stuff echo "MICHAEL ALCHEMY SETUP" export FLEX_HOME=/flex_sdk/bin export ALCHEMY_HOME=/alchemy # "This should be added before your PATH is modified" !! source /alchemy/alchemy-setup PATH=$ALCHEMY_HOME/achacks:/flex_sdk/bin:$PATH export PATH alc-on echo "MICHAEL ALCHEMY SETUP FINISHED"

14. Restart terminal (you should see your echo messages), and your install should be finished if everything went properly. It’s time to see if you can compile an swc.
15. Now is a good time to tell finder to not show all of your hidden files.You will also need to restart finder.

1 2	defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE killall Finder

16. Turn on alchemy. (For some reason this still has to be done even though it is in the bashrc file)

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alc-on

17. Check to make sure you are using the alchemy compilers. You should see the output of the path pointing to the gcc compiler in your /alchemy directory

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which gcc

18. If you see the proper gcc compiler you are good to continue. Navigate to the alchemy/samples/stringecho folder

1	cd /alchemy/samples/stringecho/

19. Enter the following command to compile the stringecho .swc

1	gcc stringecho.c -O3 -Wall -swc -o stringecho.swc

20. You will see some output in your terminal window, and if everything worked there should be an swc file named stringecho.swc in the /alchemy/samples/stringecho folder just waiting to be used.

In my search for information on installing adobe alchemy I came across the following sites that I found to have some very good information (mostly talking about windows install though):

• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Alchemy:Documentation:Getting_Started
• http://www.zeropointnine.com/wiki/index.php?n=FlashPlatform.Alchemy
• http://www.insideria.com/2009/04/setting-up-adobe-alchemy.html

Now as I said this is just the method that I used to install alchemy and I have found it to work for me. I have used this method now on several computers with out running into any issues. But that said if you do see anything wrong with what I am doing above, or have better way about doing it please comment below. I would love to see what you are doing.

Tagged as actionscript c/c++, Adobe Alchemy, Alchemy, Alchemy Toolkit, AS3, C/C++, how-to, install, os x 10.6, setup, terminal, walk through + Categorized as AS3, AS3, Alchemy, AS3, Code Librarys