decaf-emu/BUILDING.md

Building decaf-emu from source

• Windows
• Linux
• MacOS
• CMake
• Troubleshooting

Windows

Dependencies

Required:

• Visual Studio 2019
• CMake
• Vulkan SDK

Optional:

• [Qt 5.15+ / 6+] (https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer), disable by using -DDECAF_QT=OFF

Building

• git clone --recursive https://github.com/decaf-emu/decaf-emu.git

Use cmake-gui to generate a VS project file:

• Set Where is the source code to [path to decaf-emu.git]
• Set Where to build the binaries to [path to decaf-emu.git]/build
• Click Add Entry and set Name: CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, Type: PATH, Value to a Qt5 or Qt6 installation directory, e.g. Value: C:\Qt\5.15.2\msvc2019_64
• Click Configure
• Ensure Specify the generator for this project is set to a version of Visual Studio installed on your computer
• Select Specify toolchain for cross-compiling
• Click Next
• Set Specify the toolchain file to [path to decaf-emu.git]/libraries/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
• Click Finish
• Configure will run, which may take a while as vcpkg acquires the dependencies, if all works the console should say Configuring done
• Click Generate, if all works the console should say Generating done
• Click Open Project to open the generated project in Visual sStudio where you can develop and build.

Linux

Dependencies

Required:

• A modern C++17 friendly compiler such as g++9
• CMake

Required dependencies which can be acquired from system or vcpkg:

• c-ares
• curl
• ffmpeg
• libuv
• openssl
• sdl2
• zlib

For some systems, these can be installed with:

• apt install cmake libcurl4-openssl-dev libsdl2-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libuv1-dev libc-ares-dev libavcodec-dev libavfilter-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

Optional:

• Vulkan SDK, disable by using -DDECAF_VULKAN=OFF
• [Qt 5.15+ / 6+] (https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer), disable by using -DDECAF_QT=OFF

For some systems, Qt can be installed with:

• apt install qtbase5-dev qtbase5-private-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

Building

• git clone --recursive https://github.com/decaf-emu/decaf-emu.git
• cd decaf-emu
• mkdir build
• cd build
• cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../
• make

You might want to use cmake -G Ninja <...> and build with Ninja instead of Make for faster builds.

MacOS

Currently decaf-emu can build on MacOS using Xcode 11 although MoltenVK is missing crucial features which will prevent most games from rendering correctly, e.g. geometry shaders, transform feedback, logic op support, unrestricted depth range. This means the platform should be considered as unsupported.

CMake

Options interesting to users:

• DECAF_FFMPEG - Build with ffmpeg which is used for decoding h264 videos
• DECAF_QT - Build with Qt frontend.
• DECAF_VULKAN - Build with Vulkan backend.

Options interesting to developers:

• DECAF_BUILD_TESTS - Build tests.
• DECAF_BUILD_TOOLS - Build tools.
• DECAF_GIT_VERSION - Set this to OFF to disable generating a header with current git version to avoid rebuilding decaf_log.cpp when you do commits locally.
• DECAF_PCH - Enable / disable pch (requires CMake v3.16)
• DECAF_JIT_PROFILING - Build with JIT profiling support.
• DECAF_VALGRIND - Build with Valgrind

Troubleshooting

decaf-emu builds on github actions CI - so a good reference on how to build is always the CI script itself .github/workflows/ccpp.yml