PlayStation 2 Compilation / Development Guide

Environment configuration

You need the homebrew PlayStation 2 SDK and toolchain installed. You can follow how to install the toolchain over here ps2toolchain

Additionally you need the PS2 Graphics Synthesizer installed. You can follow how to install the GSKit over here gsKit

Finally you need to install specific ports for PlayStation 2. You can follow how to install the PlayStation 2 Ports over here ps2sdk-ports

RetroArch Compilation

Fetching RetroArch

Clone RetroArch's repository from GitHub

git clone https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch.git retroarch
cd retroarch

For subsequent builds you only need to pull the changes from the repo

cd retroarch
git pull

To update your local copy from the repository run git pull

Building RetroArch separately

To compile RetroArch (for PlayStation 2) run: make -f Makefile.ps2

Note

RetroArch on PlayStation PS2 is statically linked. With statically linked RetroArch, each executable is a separate libretro core instead of the core being separately loaded from a single executable. A pre-existing libretro library needs to be present in the root directory in order to link RetroArch PS2. This file needs to be called 'libretro_ps2.a'.

After a few seconds/minutes you should be able to find a retroarch_ps2.elf file under that directory.

Building RetroArch in bulk

Instead of building each core one by one, you can build all cores as a batch task. Run from the main 'retroarch' directory:

cd dist-scripts

Note

Make sure that all the libretro cores that you want to compile are inside the 'dist-scripts' directory.

Once inside this directory, run :

This process will also automate the packaging process for you.

Packaging RetroArch

Additional Tips:

Core Compilation

Fetching Cores

The easiest way to fetch all the cores is to use libretro-super. Run

./libretro-fetch.sh

Building Cores

The easiest way to build all the cores (for PlayStation Portable) is to use libretro-super. Run

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.:

Once finished, you can find the libretro cores inside directory dist/ps2.