Windows 7 and later compilation and development guide

Warning

The MinGW toolchain we use in this guide no longer supports targeting Windows Vista or earlier.
Please refer to one of the MSVC guides for how to target older Windows versions with Visual Studio.

This video covers quick demonstrations of these subjects;

1. Environment Configuration

2. Building RetroArch

3. Packaging RetroArch

Be sure to read instructions that are given in this page.

Environment configuration

We recommend MinGW-W64 from MSYS2. You can download MSYS2 installer from here.

Follow the installation instructions and once finished start the MSYS2 shell.

MSYS2 shell is a maintenance shell. We are going to use this shell to install the toolchain and other packages. First order of business is to update MSYS2. Start the MSYS2 Shell and run the following commands:

pacman --noconfirm -Sy
pacman --needed --noconfirm -S bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime

Close MSYS2 shell and start it again, and:

pacman --noconfirm -Su

Restart MSYS2 once again. Now we can start installing the packages we actually need.

For 32-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed wget git make mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-i686-ntldd mingw-w64-i686-zlib mingw-w64-i686-pkg-config mingw-w64-i686-SDL2 mingw-w64-i686-libxml2 mingw-w64-i686-freetype mingw-w64-i686-python3 mingw-w64-i686-ffmpeg mingw-w64-i686-drmingw

For 64-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed wget git make mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-ntldd mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 mingw-w64-x86_64-freetype mingw-w64-x86_64-python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-ffmpeg mingw-w64-x86_64-drmingw

You might want to install Qt too if you want to be able to use the desktop GUI.

For 32-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed mingw-w64-i686-qt5 mingw-w64-i686-openssl

For 64-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5  mingw-w64-x86_64-openssl

The NVIDIA CG toolkit package hasn't been updated for a while so you need to download that package manually and install with pacman. You can download the packages from sourceforge at the following locations: 32-bit / 64-bit. Alternatively you can use the following commands directly:

For 32-bit builds:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/files/REPOS/MINGW_GCC_4_9/i686/mingw-w64-i686-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any.pkg.tar.xz/download -O mingw-w64-i686-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U mingw-w64-i686-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any.pkg.tar.xz

For 64-bit builds:

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64-archlinux/files/x86_64/mingw-w64-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any_4.pkg.tar.xz/download -O mingw-w64-x86_64-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U mingw-w64-x86_64-nvidia-cg-toolkit-3.1-2-any.pkg.tar.xz

Once these packages are installed close MSYS2 shell and open MinGW-w32 shell or MinGW-w64 shell depending on the platform you want to build for.

You'll need gcc and make:

pacman -S make
pacman -S gcc

RetroArch Compilation

Building RetroArch

The first step is to obtain RetroArch's source tree.
You can find the repository directly at GitHub

Start the MINGW64 or the MINGW32 shell depending on what you want to compile and run the following commands:

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

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

cd retroarch
git pull

To compile RetroArch, run the following commands inside RetroArch's source tree:

./configure
make clean
make -j4

For development purposes you might want to run a debug build instead. In such case use the following commands:

./configure
make clean
make DEBUG=1 GL_DEBUG=1 -j4

To facilitate debugging you can get an integrated crash handler by replacing the configure step with (debug builds only):

 ./configure --enable-drmingw

After a few minutes you should be able to find retroarch.exe under that directory. To start the newly compiled retroarch you can use:

./retroarch

Packaging RetroArch

You might not be able to start your own build outside that environment. You might want to try to get all the required DLLs by running the following script in your destination RetroArch folder (not the git repo folder):

for i in $(seq 3); do for bin in $(ntldd -R *exe | grep -i mingw | cut -d">" -f2 | cut -d" " -f2); do cp -vu "$bin" . ; done; done

If Qt is enabled for your build (detected automatically by default), the following is also needed:

windeployqt --no-patchqt --no-translations retroarch.exe
for i in $(seq 3); do for bin in $(ntldd -R imageformats/*dll | grep -i mingw | cut -d">" -f2 | cut -d" " -f2); do cp -vu "$bin" . ; done; done

If you really want to get the required libraries for distribution or for personal use on other devices and LDD doesn't work for you for whatever reason, then you can try Dependency Walker.

Tip

If you're building frequently you may want to add ccache to the mix to speed up the build process.
Install ccache via the package manager and the prepend the ccache symlink directory to your build environment path as shown below.

For further instructions check the documentation

Install ccache for 32-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed make mingw-w64-i686-ccache

Install ccache for 64-bit builds:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed mingw-w64-x86_64-ccache

Configure paths for 32-bit builds:

export PATH=/mingw32/lib/ccache/bin/:$PATH

Configure paths for 64-bit builds:

export PATH=/mingw64/lib/ccache/bin/:$PATH

Build with both ccache and the -j5 flag to specify five concurrent tasks:

ccache make -j5

Tip

You can add this to /etc/profile under both the 32-bit and 64-bit setups by adding ${MINGW_MOUNT_POINT}/lib/ccache/bin to the front of the PATH variables found in MINGW32) and MINGW64), around line 50 of profile, to ensure the proper binaries are loaded for each development environment.

From our own buildbot, the times with and without ccache are the following:

Without ccache:

real    2m7.645s
user    0m2.585s
sys     0m11.527s

With ccache:

real    0m25.466s
user    0m2.902s
sys     0m9.952s

Tip

You can also strip the debug symbols of the build product to save some space.

Strip retroarch:

strip -s retroarch.exe

Core Compilation

Fetching Cores

You can find the cores on libretro's GitHUB organization.

We have an all-in-one tool to fetch and compile cores which you can use to streamline the process.
You can obtain the tool by using these commands:

git clone https://github.com/libretro/libretro-super.git
cd libretro-super

Then you can fetch one or all the cores by using libretro-fetch.sh

Fetch all cores:

./libretro-fetch.sh

Fetch one core:

./libretro-fetch.sh *corename*

Note

Replace corename with the name of the core you want to fetch, for example gambatte

Building Cores

libretro-super

The easiest way to build all the cores is to use libretro-build.sh from within libretro-super's source tree:

./libretro-build.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:

./libretro-build.sh snes9x2010 fceumm

Once compilation has finished, you can find the libretro cores inside dist/win.

Manual Fetching and Compilation

Get the core's source tree. As an example we'll use fceumm

git clone https://github.com/libretro/libretro-fceumm.git

Then compile the core:

cd libretro-fceumm
make -f Makefile.libretro

Optionally strip the build product:

strip fceumm_libretro.dll

Most cores will build with these instructions. You might need to browse to a subdirectory in some cases.

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Last update: 2024-04-18