Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
126 lines (87 loc) · 4.61 KB

README-msys2.md

File metadata and controls

126 lines (87 loc) · 4.61 KB
Raw

Using ngdevkit natively on the Windows platform

The ngdevkit toolchain can be compiled natively and used as any other Windows executable by means of the MSYS2 environment. MSYS2 is the minimal POSIX-like environment that makes the building of ngdevkit feasible on the Windows platform.

Once built, the resulting binaries are fully Native Windows binaries that do not have any runtime dependencies on MSYS2. For example, the GnGeo emulator does not depend on MSYS2 to be run. However, the MSYS2 environment itself is still super useful as a development environment, for instance to build the example ROMs.

Prepare your environment for compilation

Building ngdevkit on Windows currently requires two big dependencies: the MSYS2 environment to build the toolchain, and a Python 3 release for Windows from https://www.python.org. The latter is needed because that is currently the only way to install a pre-built PyGame on Windows, which is a dependency of ngdevkit.

Install Python and PyGame

Download the Python 3 binary release according to your Windows platform, run the installer, and remember where you installed your Python environment. For the sake of the example, this document assumes that the Python 3 interpreter is installed for user ngdevkit in:

C:/Users/ngdevkit/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python

Once the Python environment is installed, install a pre-built version of PyGame with pip:

C:/Users/ngdevkit/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python -m pip install pygame

Your python environment is now ready to be used to compile ngdevkit

Install MSYS2

To build ngdevkit, we rely on MSYS2 to provide the necessary C development tools and generate native Windows executables.

Download the MSYS2 installer and install the MSYS2 environment locally. For the sake of the example this document assumes that you installed it in the default location:

C:\msys64

MSYS2 has two different runtimes:

  • The MSYS2 runtime, which is a minimal POSIX-like environment
  • The MinGW-w64 runtime, which is the full Windows-native runtime

Ngdevkit is built for Windows, so it targets the MinGW-w64 runtime. However, in order to compile it successfully, you still need to run the compilation in the MSYS2 runtime, as this runtime will deal automatically with file path translation from POSIX to Windows.

Start a MSYS2 shell by running "MSYS2 MSYS" from the Start menu. Alternatively, you can also start the shell from cmd.exe or from PowerShell with:

C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe -l

Once you are in a MSYS2 shell, make sure your MSYS2 installation is up-to-date with:

pacman -Syuu

Compiling the devkit

In a MSYS2 shell, first install all the ngdevkit dependencies:

pacman -S git msys2-runtime-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
pacman -S msys2-w32api-headers msys2-w32api-runtime windows-default-manifest
pacman -S autoconf autoconf-archive automake pkgconf make tar zip unzip
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-glew mingw-w64-x86_64-nsis
pacman -S gmp-devel isl-devel mpc-devel mpfr-devel texinfo
pacman -S flex bison expat gettext ncurses-devel zlib-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-boost
# dependencies for the example ROMs
pacman -S rsync mingw-w64-x86_64-sox mingw-w64-x86_64-imagemagick

You can now compile the entire devkit. You just have to pass the location of the Python 3 distribution you downloaded earlier to the configure script. Note that the path has to be passed in the MSYS2 path format:

autoreconf -iv
./configure --prefix=$PWD/local --enable-msys2 --with-python=/c/Users/ngdevkit/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python
make
make install

The most tedious part is over! you then need to configure your environment to add the built binaries to your PATH. You can do so automatically with:

eval $(make shellinit)

Congratulations! You are now ready to experiment with the devkit and build the example ROMs:

cd examples
# make sure the environment variable are set
eval $(make shellinit)
# ensure Windows-native binaries are available in PATH
export PATH=/mingw64/bin:$PATH
autoreconf -I/mingw64/share/aclocal -iv
# build the example ROMs
./configure --enable-msys2 --with-python=/c/Users/ngdevkit/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python
make

Look at the main README file for more details on how to run the examples and the debugger.