macOS/OSX Compilation / Development Guide¶
This compilation guide will teach you how to build RetroArch for macOS/OSX.
The following versions of the operating system are supported:
- OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
- OSX 10.7 (Lion)
- OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
- OSX 10.9 (Mavericks)
- OSX 10.10 (Yosemite)
- OSX 10.11 (El Capitan)
- macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
- macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
- macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
- macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
- macOS 11 Big Sur
RetroArch can work on:
- 32bit Intel processor-powered Macs
- 64bit Intel processor-powered Macs
- 64bit ARM processor-powered Macs
This video covers a quick demonstration of these subjects;
-
Environment Configuration
-
Building RetroArch
Be sure to read instructions that are given on this page.
Environment configuration¶
The following software needs to be installed:
- XCode
- (Optional) NVIDIA Cg Toolkit
Note
You need to make sure you have the macOS 10.11 SDK or lower when compiling this software, or else the OpenGL driver might have several issues that currently cannot be fixed.
RetroArch Compilation¶
Fetching RetroArch¶
Clone RetroArch's repository from GitHub
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For subsequent builds you only need to pull the changes from the repo
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To update your local copy from the repository run git pull
Building RetroArch separately¶
Using the graphical interface¶
Open Xcode. Open the following project file pkg/apple/RetroArch.xcodeproj
in the Xcode IDE and build (⌘-B) and run (⌘-R) it there. Or you can use the command line....
Using the command line¶
To build a debug build :
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To build a release build :
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Packaging RetroArch¶
Additional Tips:¶
Core Compilation¶
Fetching Cores¶
The easiest way to fetch all the cores is to use libretro-super.
To get libretro-super, run:
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Now you can run the following command to download the source for all cores:
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Building Cores¶
The easiest way to build all the cores (for iOS) is to use libretro-super.
To build all cores for OSX, run
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In case you only want to build one and/or more cores instead of all, you can specify the cores you want to build after the first command in no particular order. E.g.:
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Once finished, you can find the libretro cores inside directory dist/osx
.