Nintendo Wii Compilation / Development Guide¶
Environment configuration¶
You need to have installed devkitPro, the homebrew Nintendo Wii SDK (libOGC) and the devkitPPC (r29 or r29-1) toolchain on your computer.
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 of the RetroArch repository, run git pull
Building RetroArch separately¶
First, you need to compile Salamander.
To compile Salamander (for Wii) run:
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Rename the file retroarch-salamander_wii.dol as boot.dol. This file is the frontend launcher for the other cores (indeed files containing core and frontend).
Second, to compile RetroArch for Wii (the core and the frontend), rename the compiled core as 'libretro_wii.a' (see below how to compile a core in the "Building Cores" section), put it in the RetroArch directory and run:
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Note
RetroArch on Wii 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 Wii. This file needs to be called 'libretro_wii.a'.
After a few seconds/minutes you should be able to find a retroarch_wii.elf and retroarch_wii.dol 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:
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Note
Make sure that all the libretro cores that you want to compile are inside the 'dist-scripts' directory.
Once inside this directory, run :
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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. Download libretro-super from GitHub and run
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Building Cores¶
The easiest way to build all the cores (for Wii) is to use libretro-super. If not already fetched, put the codes of the cores you want compile in the libretro-super directory and 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/wii.
Another way to compile cores, is by cloning the core's repository (for example, FCEUmm) from GitHub.
In this case, to clone FCEUmm-Libretro repo:
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For subsequent builds you only need to pull the changes from the core's repo (ex., FCEUmm)
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To update your local copy from the repository of the core (in this case FCEUmm), run git pull
To compile the core for Wii (in this case, FCEUmm) run:
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Some cores (example, Snes9x) have a dedicated makefile for compile as a Libretro core. To compile the core for Wii with the dedicated Libretro makefile run:
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Rename the compiled core as 'libretro_wii.a', then put it in the RetroArch directory and follow the instructions in the "Building RetroArch separately" section.