Problems getting pygame to show anything but a blank screen on Macos

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Tested and works on macOS 10.15 Catalina, Python 3.7.5, PyGame 2.0.0 (pre-release as of this writing) and PyGame 1.9.6 (stable as of this writing).

Initially you need to decide if you want a stable release or a pre-release (unstable). If you decide to use the latest (and possibly pre-release/unstable) then just ignore the first step (“1. Find the latest stable release version”) and use master branch at step 4 of the second step (“2. Install PyGame from source”).

1. Find the latest stable release version

Go to PyGame’s GitHub page here:

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As you can see as of this writing the latest stable release is 1.9.6 so we hold this tag name for later.

2. Install PyGame on macOS from source

  1. Install some dependencies brew install sdl2 sdl2_gfx sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_net sdl2_ttf. This requires homebrew.
  2. Go to site-packages:
    • For virtual environment go to cd ~/.virtualenvs/myvirtualenv/lib/python3.X/site-packages where ~/.virtualenvs/myvirtualenv is the path to your virtual environment and python3.X is the version of your Python.
    • For system-wide installation go to /usr/local/lib/python3.X/site-packages where python3.X is the version of your Python.
  3. Delete any previous pygame, pip uninstall pygame (if a pygame directory exists in site-packages then remove it: rm -rf pygame*)
  4. Clone PyGame from GitHub:
    • git clone https://github.com/pygame/pygame.git for the latest (possibly not stable version).
    • git clone -b 1.9.6 https://github.com/pygame/pygame.git --single-branch for the latest (1.9.6 is the tag name of the latest stable release, as of this writing, see “Find the latest stable release version above”)
  5. Go into the newly cloned pygame directory: cd pygame.
  6. Run python setup.py --config --auto --sdl2.
    • If you get problems with this command, some users below mentioned that single hyphens worked for them, therefore try: python setup.py -config -auto -sdl2.
    • If you get any problems regarding Python2/3 and you are targeting Python3 try to change python setup.py --config --auto --sdl2 to python3 setup.py --config --auto --sdl2.
  7. Run python setup.py install (it will take a while).
    • If you get any problems regarding Python2/3 and you are targeting Python3 try to change python setup.py --config --auto --sdl2 to python3 setup.py --config --auto --sdl2.

Now PyGame should work as expected on macOS.

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