Building the devkit for macOS requires brew, the macOS package manager. Please make sure you installed it and upgraded it before proceeding to the compilation of ngdevkit.
Brew allows you to install all the packages that ngdevkit depends on. If brew is up to date on your system, it should install pre-built packages (called bottles), so most of the time will be spent in compiling the devkit itself and not its dependencies.
You will need XCode, and GNU Make 4.x. Please note that the version of
GNU Make shipped with XCode is too old for ngdevkit, so you need to
install it from brew and use gmake instead of make as explained
later in this documentation.
The devkit uses Python 3, which is installed globally in macOS but also in brew. To make sure you are installing python dependencies in the right python distribution, you need to have brew's python first in your PATH, as explained later in the document.
In order to build the devkit you need autoconf, autoconf-archive and GNU Make 4.x, and various additional dependencies to build the toolchain modules such as GCC and SDCC. The devkit tools uses Python 3 and PyGame 2. The emulator requires SDL 2 and optionally OpenGL libraries.
The examples require ImageMagick for all the graphics trickery and sox for audio conversion purpose.
Make sure that brew is in your PATH and its environment variables are
set up properly. By default, brew is installed in /usr/local/bin/brew
on Intel macs, and in /opt/homebrew/bin/brew on ARM macs. If brew
is not found in your PATH, you must initialize your it with:
eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)
# Intel macs would use /usr/local/bin/brew shellenv
Then, ngdevkit's dependencies are installed as follows:
brew update
brew install gmake
brew install autoconf-archive
brew install glew sdl2 sdl2_image
brew install python3
# make sure you use brew's python3 to install pygame
# if not, update your path like e.g.
# export PATH=$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/python3/bin:$PATH
pip3 install pygame --break-system-packages
brew deps gcc | xargs brew install
brew deps sdcc | xargs brew install
# dependencies for the example ROMs
brew install zip imagemagick sox
In order to build ngdevkit, the installed brew dependencies must be available to the compiler, so you must add brew's PATH into your build flags manually:
export CFLAGS="-I${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/include${CFLAGS+ ${CFLAGS}}"
export CXXFLAGS="-I${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/include${CXXFLAGS+ ${CXXFLAGS}}"
export CPPFLAGS="-I${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/include${CPPFLAGS+ ${CPPFLAGS}}"
export LDFLAGS="-L${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/lib -Wl,-rpath,${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/lib${LDFLAGS+ ${LDFLAGS}}"
The devkit relies on autotools to check for dependencies and autodetect the proper build flags. It is advised that you build the entire devkit in a self-contained directory inside your local git repository with:
autoreconf -iv
./configure --prefix=$PWD/local
gmake
gmake install
Please note that the devkit is built with gmake which has been
installed by brew. This is because internally ngdevkit relies on
features of GNU Make that are only available from version 4.
Once the devkit is built, 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. Please follow the main README for additional information on how to download and build the example ROMs, run the emulator or run the debugger.