Nintendo Wii U Compilation / Development Guide¶

Environment configuration¶

You need the DevkitPPC(r29) toolchain installed and the DEVKITPRO and DEVKITPPC environment variables set to the respective folders.

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 Wii U) run:

make -f Makefile.wiiu

Note

RetroArch on Wii U 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 U. This file needs to be called 'libretro_wiiu.a'.

After a few seconds/minutes you should be able to find a retroarch_wiiu.elf and retroarch_wiiu.rpx 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. you can also copy the info files and icons in the same directory to have them added to the package, and to generate the meta.xml files.

Once inside this directory, run :

./wiiu-cores.sh

This process will also automate the packaging process for you. the output will be in pkg/wiiu.

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 Wii U) is to use libretro-super. Run

./libretro-build-wiiu.sh

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.:

./libretro-build-wiiu.sh snes9x2010 fceumm

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