The latest version of the openMSX manual can be found on the openMSX home page:
http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/manual/
You can also use this URL to get up-to-date versions of the hyperlinks if you printed out this manual.
This guide is about openMSX, the open source MSX emulator that tries to achieve near-perfect emulation by using a novel emulation model. You can find more information about openMSX on the openMSX home page.
If you just want to use openMSX, there is likely a pre-packaged version you can use. This document describes how you can compile openMSX from source, which is useful if:
If you need help compiling openMSX, please contact us. If you needed any modifications to make openMSX compile, please send those modifications to us, so we can make openMSX ever more portable.
The following people contributed to this document in one way or another:
Thanks to all of them!
For the revision history, please refer to the SVN log.
Before you can start compiling openMSX, you have to make sure your system has all the necessary build tools installed, as well as the libraries openMSX depends upon. The following sections tell you how you can prepare your system.
Every section starts with generic instructions, that apply to all platforms and compilers. At the end of each section, platform specific notes cover differences or additional steps for certain platforms or compilers.
For compilation, you need Python, a C++ compiler, and some compiler-specific programs. If you have compiled packages from source before, you probably have some of these installed already.
C:\Python26
) to your PATH
manually.For compilation with gcc, you need GNU Make and g++:
Install the Xcode Tools from Apple, which you can find on the Mac OS X installation DVD. Alternatively, you can download it from the Apple Developer Connection (free registration required). The Xcode Tools package contains up-to-date versions of Make, GCC and SVN. If you are running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), make sure you also install support for compiling for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which is an optional component.
Note that Mac OS X 10.3 uses GCC 3.3 as the system compiler, which is not able to compile openMSX. The easy solution for this is to use a Mac with OS X 10.4 or 10.5 and compile a stand-alone binary (see next section), which will run on 10.3 as well. An alternative would be to get a more recent GCC running on OS X 10.3, but that seems to be problematic.
You need to install MinGW and MSYS.
You can download MinGW and MSYS from the download page of the MinGW project. Download the latest version of the "Automated MinGW Installer" (5.1.4 is the latest at the time of writing) and download also "MSYS Base System" (use 1.0.11 Release Candidate or newer, if available, because 1.0.10 is too old), i.e. the installer .exe
file.
Double click on the MinGW package after downloading, choose "Download and Install", Package "Current" and add component "g++". Use the default installation directory (C:\MinGW
), or at least a directory without spaces and not a network folder (i.e. shared folder on another computer). For MSYS, the installer's default settings (destination directory C:\msys\1.0
) will be OK. If you get questions in a post-install Command Prompt dialog, type: y
, y
, C:/MinGW
(or the other directory you chose without spaces; but do note that you should use forward slashes in the path here!), y
.
Note: there is a bug in the MinGW Runtime (mingwrt) package version 3.15.1, which will cause FreeType not to compile (and probably more). Make sure you have the latest (newer) version installed! (Which will be the case if you do a fresh install using the instructions above.)
There are three different ways to obtain the Visual C++ compiler:
openMSX depends on the following libraries:
You can install the required libraries systemwide, or you can use the "3rd party libraries" support in the openMSX build system and build a stand-alone binary. Systemwide is recommended if you run a modular operating system (such as Linux, BSD or Mac OS X with MacPorts or Fink) and you intend to only use the openMSX binary on your computer. The 3rd party library system is recommended if you build for other operating systems (Windows, plain Mac OS X or embedded systems) or if you want to build a binary that can be used on other computers besides your own. If you choose the latter, please skip to the Stand-alone Binary chapter.
You can easily install all required packages using the "build dependencies" feature of the APT package manager:
Most Linux distributions have libraries split over two packages: a runtime package and a development package.
The runtime package for the "Foo" library is typically called
libfoo
, the development package is typically named
libfoo-dev
or libfoo-devel
.
Applications that use a library only require the runtime package to be installed, but compilation requires both the runtime package and the development package to be installed.
The easiest thing to do is to use the stand-alone binary method, which will get the libraries automatically. If you want to do things manually, you can get the libraries from either
MacPorts
or
Fink. These are tools to give you access to a large collection of software packages (or ports). You can use them to install those packages (or ports).
If you are using MacPorts, you should install the ports
libpng
, libsdl
and libsdl_image
.
If you are using Fink, you should install the packages
libpng3
, sdl
and sdl-image
.
We strongly recommend using the Stand-alone Binary method, which means the openMSX build system will download and compile all libraries automatically.
When building with Visual C++, the optional libraries mentioned above are arranged as follows:
Also, when building with Visual C++, the "3rd party libraries" support in the openMSX build system must be used. The resulting binary statically links in all dependencies, including the C runtime. For more details, please see the Stand-alone Binary chapter.
openMSX is developed using the tools SourceForge.net freely offers to open source projects. The code is stored in Subversion (SVN), an open source version management system. Once in a while an openMSX release is made.
There are several options for getting the source code:
tar.gz
archive.
A snapshot is therefore quite similar to a SVN checkout,
but it doesn't require you to install and use SVN. We really do not recommend to use SVN snapshots anymore, as they are usually very outdated and have other disadvantages.
Releases are intended for general users, SVN and SVN snapshots are intended for (would be) developers, heavy testers and people who want to follow new developments closely. It might be a good idea to play with a release first. If you like what you see and want to get in deeper, you can switch to SVN later. If you update often, it is best to use a SVN checkout rather than a SVN snapshot, because with a checkout you can do efficient incremental updates, saving network bandwidth and compile time.
If you downloaded a version that is either a lot older or a lot newer than
this guide, it is a good idea to read the guide included in your downloaded
version instead of the version you're reading right now.
You can find the Compilation Guide in the directory
doc/manual
.
You can download a released version of openMSX from the download page at SourceForge. The latest version is probably the best one. This guide assumes that you are using the latest release.
After downloading, type the following in a UNIX or MSYS shell, or use another decompression tool:
in which VERSION
is the openMSX version you downloaded, or use the
file name you saved the tar.gz file with. The directory that is created by uncompressing the tar.gz
file
is called the top of the source tree.
Getting a SVN checkout means you use SVN to retrieve the latest version
of the source code of openMSX.
This means you will need to install an SVN client.
This package is usually named subversion
.
There are graphical front-ends for SVN,
but this guide will tell you how to use SVN from the command line. More information about SVN can be found on the Subversion book site.
Windows users might want to look at SlikSVN for a command line tool, TortoiseSVN for Windows Explorer integration, or ankhSVN for Visual Studio integration.
With the following line you can retrieve the latest sources (also works on Windows when using SlikSVN):
In this line you specified where you want to retrieve the files from (host name of the SVN server), what project you want to retrieve (openmsx in this case), what module you want to get (openmsx in this case, which is the module that contains the sources of the main openMSX program), which branch you want to retrieve (trunk in this case, which is the main development branch) and what directory it should be checked out to (we chose openMSX in this example).
In TortoiseSVN, use https://openmsx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openmsx/openmsx/trunk
as
the "URL of repository" and the directory of your choice as the "Checkout directory". Use the HEAD
revision and click OK.
When compiling openMSX on Windows with gcc, it's often convenient to use C:\msys\1.0\home\<username>\openMSX
as the checkout directory, as this is easy to reach from an MSYS shell - it's
your MSYS home directory.
If you're a developer, it makes sense to add the following option to the svn commandline as well:
The SVN command created a directory called openMSX
for you
in the current directory (or in the "Checkout directory" you specified in TortoiseSVN). In addition to the openMSX code, you will see hidden
SVN administration directories which are all called svn
or
.svn
.
Do not mess with these (nor move contents of this checkout directory around), otherwise SVN will get confused.
This directory created by SVN is what we will call in this manual the top
of the source tree.
If you want to update your source tree later, go to the top of the source tree and type:
or right click on the openMSX directory in Windows Explorer and select "SVN Update".
As we stated above: better not use this anymore.
This section explains how to build openMSX for a local system. If you want to create a binary that runs everywhere, we recommend you to skip this chapter and use the stand-alone binary method. We also recommend to do that for Mac OS X and especially for Microsoft Windows systems.
Now that all the necessary tools and libraries are installed, you are almost ready to start the actual compilation of openMSX.
The first thing you may want to know is that you can build openMSX in different flavours. The default flavour depends on the CPU, but is always one that is optimized for performance. For example for x86 processors the default flavour is "i686": i.e., with optimisations for Pentium II and higher, without any debugging stuff. Note: On an older VIA Epia (with the Samuel 2 CPU at least), a binary built with "i686" flavour will not run. Please use the "opt" flavour for that platform.
If you are testing new openMSX developments or making changes in openMSX, you can benefit from asserts and debug symbols. To get those, you should select the "devel" flavour, like this:
Although the default flavours will probably be OK for most cases, you may want to write a specific flavour for your particular wishes. The flavour files are all named build/flavour-*.mk
.
You can select the C++ compiler to be used like this:
This can be useful if the default compiler on your system is an old GCC version which is either not capable of compiling openMSX, or generates less efficient code.
Now we can let a script check if you have indeed all necessary libraries and headers installed. Go to the top of your openMSX source tree and run the following script:
This script will report what versions of libraries you have installed. It also reports which components can be built with those libraries. If the script reports that it can't build the openMSX core component, you should install the missing ones before you can continue. Otherwise, you can decide to install the libraries needed for the optional components, or to continue without building some components (e.g. the OpenGL based renderers).
If installing the correct libraries doesn't help,
contact the openMSX developers.
If you file a bug report, please attach the probe.log
file
that is written by the configure
script in the directory
derived/<cpu>-<os>-<flavour>/config/
.
You can customise the build process by editing the file
build/custom.mk
.
The most likely thing you might want to customise is the installation directory (INSTALL_BASE
).
If you are installing openMSX on a system on which you do not have
superuser (root) privileges, you can set the installation directory
to a subdirectory of your home directory.
After successfully running configure
,
it's time to compile everything.
To start compilation, type:
Depending on how fast your system is, this may take several minutes to half an hour.
If you get errors during compilation, there may be something wrong that was not detected by configure. Verify that you installed all required libraries, both the run time and development packages. If that doesn't help, or we forgot to list a library openMSX depends on, contact the openMSX developers. Make sure you provide us with the error message you got.
By default, openMSX is compiled for the type of CPU that is present in your Mac. If you want to build for a different CPU, use export OPENMSX_TARGET_CPU=ppc
(PowerPC) or export OPENMSX_TARGET_CPU=x86
(Intel). If you want to build a universal binary, use export OPENMSX_TARGET_CPU=univ
.
If you have a G4 or better PPC CPU, using export OPENMSX_FLAVOUR=ppcg4
may give you a faster openMSX executable.
While it is possible to configure the supplied Visual C++ project files to dynamically link against import libraries, this is not currently supported.
To install openMSX, run the following command:
This installs openMSX, by default in /opt/openMSX
.
Note that only root has rights to write to system-wide directories such as
/opt
,
so you may have to do su
before make install
, or use sudo
.
On Mac OS X, the build creates an application folder. You can "install" this by copying it to a different location. The application folder will depend on systemwide installed libraries, so it will not work on Macs without those libraries.
You can run openMSX from the application folder with the following command:
If you want to see the messages openMSX prints to stdout and stderr, start openMSX like this:
This chapter describes how to build a binary of openMSX that does not depend on any library except those that are available on the platform by default. This procedure is highly recommended on Microsoft Windows. It is also recommended on Mac OS X if you are not a MacPorts or Fink user.
The stand-alone binary is made by linking statically against all libraries which are not available as part of the basic platform. The build system will automatically download the sources for these libraries and build them in the minimal configuration needed by openMSX.
If you want to change something about this process, for example switch to a newer library release, edit the build/3rdparty.mk
Makefile.
Just like for normal compilation, you can set environment variables such as OPENMSX_FLAVOUR
, CXX
, OPENMSX_TARGET_CPU
and OPENMSX_TARGET_OS
.
To build a stand-alone binary, run the following command at the top of the source tree:
The final output files will be produced in derived/<cpu>-<os>-<flavour>-3rd/bindist
.
The final output is a DMG file (Mac disk image) containing the openMSX application folder and documentation. This file is internet-enabled, which means it will be automatically mounted after it is downloaded.
Here's the very short version if you want quick results on Microsoft Windows with gcc:
cd openMSX
if you chose the MSYS home directory as checkout directory)make staticbindist
A complete package will be created in derived\x86-mingw32-i686-3rd\bindist\install
.
If you additionally want to build the openMSX installer, you should refer to the package-win32
module in our Subversion repository. It contains a README file with a manual.
Note: on a 64-bit Windows system, MinGW will pretend to have built 64-bit binaries (target directory is derived\x86_64-mingw32-opt-3rd\bindist\install
), but they're actually just 32-bit.
When building with Visual C++, the result is a static executable with minimal dynamic library dependencies. Two platforms are supported:
Three different configurations are supported:
When building with Visual C++, you can either use the IDE or build from the command line using msbuild
. To do the latter, you need to open a Visual Studio command prompt. A shortcut to a Visual Studio command prompt can usually be found in your start menu. For Visual C++ 2008, it will be in "Microsoft Visual Studio 2008\Visual Studio Tools" as the "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt". For the Windows SDK, it will be in "Microsoft Windows SDK vX.Y" as the "CMD Shell"
In order to build openMSX, the libraries it depends on need to be downloaded and unpacked:
python build\3rdparty_download.py windows
The following steps can then be used to build openMSX:
msbuild -p:Configuration=Release;Platform=Win32 build\3rdparty\3rdparty.sln
msbuild -p:Configuration=Release;Platform=Win32 build\msvc\openmsx.sln
The openMSX executable will be generated in derived\Win32-VC-Release\install
.
To build for other platforms or configurations, simply replace "Release" and "Win32" in the command lines above with the desired options.
To build using the Visual C++ IDE, simply open the aforementioned solution files and from the Build menu select "Build Solution". This is exactly equivalent to building from the command line using msbuild
.
The following step creates .zip and .msi installation packages for openMSX on Windows using WiX:
build\package-windows\package.cmd platform configuration
catapult_source_path
:An example command line would be (for 64 bit):
The resulting package files can be found in derived\x64-VC-Release\package-windows.
If all went well, you should have openMSX installed now or have a stand alone working binary. You can test it by executing openMSX from the command line:
or, by double clicking the openMSX executable that resulted from the previous step.
You should get a screen similar to this:
C-BIOS 0.21 cbios.sf.net No cartridge found. This version of C-BIOS can only start cartridges. Please restart your MSX (emulator) with a cartridge inserted.
C-BIOS MSX2+ is the default system BIOS used by openMSX. It was written from scratch by BouKiCHi and he was kind enough to let us distribute it together with openMSX. It is not perfect yet, but it runs many ROM games well. Nowadays C-BIOS is a separate SourceForge.net project, with its own web page.
If you have a ROM image ready, you can try to run it with C-BIOS:
or, you can just drop it on the openMSX executable.
The next step would be to read the openMSX Setup Guide. That document describes how you can configure openMSX to emulate actual MSX machines, such as the Panasonic FS-A1GT (turboR). It also describes how you can have openMSX start up with your personal settings, how you can configure openMSX and your system for optimal performance and several other configuration related topics. And finally there is of course the openMSX User's Manual, which describes all the things you can do with openMSX once it is fully running.
If you got stuck somewhere in the compilation and installation process, please contact us. The next chapter will tell you how.
By default openMSX will not be in your search path. So to start it, you will have to specify the full path on the command line. For example:
If you built an application folder, you can run it from Finder or from the command line:
We do not have a finished GUI yet that works on Mac OS X, so you can either use openMSX from the command line for now, or use third party software like Nekolauncher openMSX or openMSX Peashooter.
You can use the Catapult launcher to run openMSX.
Since openMSX is still under heavy development, feedback and bug reports are very welcome!
If you encounter problems, you have several options:
openmsx-user
mailing list.
More info on the
openMSX mailing lists,
including an archive of old messages, can be found at SourceForge.
#openMSX
on irc.freenode.net
and ask your question there. Also reachable via Mibbit! If you don't get a reply immediately, please stick around for a while, or ask your question on the mailinglist (see below).
openmsx-devel
mailing list.
More info on the
openMSX mailing lists,
including an archive of old messages, can be found at SourceForge.
In all cases, please provide as much information as possible when you describe your bug or request.
For experienced users: if you get a crash or a hang,
try to provide a gdb
backtrace.
This will only work if you did not strip the openMSX binary
of its debug symbols.
Another useful thing to do is to install the debug versions of libstdc++ and libc6,
and then run openmsx with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/debug
exported in the environment.
This will give a more detailed stacktrace, especially in optimized code.
For experienced users: if you get a crash or a hang, try to provide a user dump. This will work for any openMSX binary, including pre-built binaries obtained from www.openmsx.org.
As of Windows Vista SP1, you can find user dump files for crashed processes in the "%LocalAppData%\CrashDumps" directory. The default Windows crash dump behavior can be further customized as per MSDN.
To generate a user dump on demand on any Windows OS, please read KB286350.
$Id: compile.html 10006 2009-06-07 21:09:51Z m9710797 $