Installing freeglut on Vista x64

I’ve recently had to install freeglut as part of a uni subject and ran across an issue due to the fact that I’m running Vista x64 and wanted to dynamically link freeglut against anything I develop during the semester. First of all, building freeglut (version 2.4.0) was problem free. I simply opened the “freeglut.dsw” file (in the root directory of the freeglut download) in Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005), agreed to convert the project files to a newer format, and then built the solution. An additional step I took, which may be completely unnecessary, was to change the build type from Debug to Release. Both build types built fine, but I used the release versions as I doubt I will be debugging freeglut. Also note that I compiled this as the default 32-bit, not 64-bit, as I’m building 32-bit GLUT apps for compatibility.

Once this was done, I followed the info in “README.win32″ (in the freeglut directory) and copied the files to the relevant directories. The specific directories I used for a Vista x64 system with VS2005 were as follows:

• copy “freeglut.h”, “freeglut_ext.h”, “freeglut_std.h”, and “glut.h” from freeglut-2.4.0\include\GL to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Include\gl.
• copy “freeglut.lib” from freeglut-2.4.0\Release to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Lib. Note that the correct destination should already contain “opengl32.lib”, “glu32.lib”, and “glaux.lib”
• Now here’s the part that caused me problems: copy “freeglut.dll” to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and NOT C:\Windows\System32 as you might expect, given that it’s a 32-bit library being used in 32-bit projects

Once the files are in place, you should be ready to use freeglut in your apps. To do so, simply include freeglut as follows:
(for some reason Wordpress hates this line in a code block…)
#include “GL/glut.h”

As you can see, we’re referencing “glut.h” and not “freeglut.h”. My guess is that this is done to maintain platform independence if your code was being built by a different incarnation of GLUT. For example I used this method to build and run the test app provided by my lecturer (unchanged), who uses the original GLUT.

***UPDATE 2009-02-27 ***
I copied the files I built on my Vista x64 machine to a 32-bit install of XP SP3 on my laptop and GLUT worked fine. The only difference to the above instructions (obviously aside from not building freeglut again) is to copy “freeglut.dll” to C:\Windows\System32. I’ve also put together a zip package of my build for anybody who wants to avoid building themselves.