Installing libdragon

Overview

Installing libdragon requires two things:

1. Installing the toolchain (that is the C compiler that can generate MIPS binary)
2. Compiling libdragon itself (the library), its tools, and its examples

Installing the toolchain can be fast (if you get a binary version) or slow (if you decide to recompile it yourself), but you only need to do this once. There is never a real need to upgrade the toolchain. Once you install it once, it will likely be fine for years to come.

Viceversa, compiling libdragon and its tools takes one minute or so, and you can do this as many times as you want, including upgrading libdragon every day (especially if you follow the preview branch). You can upgrade libdragon freely and even have ten different versions on your computer. But you still just need one toolchain.

Option 1: binary installation through Docker, with the libdragon CLI

Supported OS: Windows, Linux, macOS x86/arm

This option uses Docker as a way to quickly ship a prebuilt toolchain on all operating systems. It does not require you to explicitly learn Docker: you will interact with a libdragon CLI and Docker will be used under the hood.

See the libdragon CLI to quickly get libdragon up and running. Basically:

1. Make sure that you have Docker installed correctly (on Windows and Mac, use Docker Desktop). You can run docker system info to check that it is working correctly.

2. Install the the libdragon CLI. You have two options:

   a. Download the pre-built binary, and copy it into some directory which is part of your system PATH. b. Or, if you have npm installed (at least verstion 14), run npm install -g libdragon.

3. Run libdragon init to create a skeleton project. The first time ever you run this, it will also download the libdragon Docker image that contains the toolchain. It will also download libdragon itself and builds it for you.

4. If you want to use the preview branch of libdragon, you can switch to it now as follows:

git -C ./libdragon checkout preview
libdragon install

4. Run libdragon make to compile and build an initial test ROM

If you want, you can also compile and run one of the examples that will be found in libdragon/examples in the skeleton project.

Note for Apple Silicon users: we ship and update the docker container image for both x86-64 and arm64, so this option works on Apple Silicon machines too.

Option 2: download a prebuilt binary toolchain via zip file or deb/rpm

Supported OS: Windows (requires WSL2 or msys2), Linux

Download the pre-built toolchain, available on GitHub as a release in this repository. There is a ZIP file for Windows, plus a .deb and a .rpm file for Linux. Additional instructions:

Windows users with WSL2:

1. make sure the package manager is up to date: sudo apt-get update.
2. install prerequisites: sudo apt install build-essential
3. download the toolchain in .deb format and install it via sudo dpkg -i gcc-toolchain-mips64-x86_64.deb
4. close the terminal and open a new one
5. Get a copy of libdragon from GitHub (via git or how you prefer) and unpack it somewhere, then run ./build.sh to build and install libdragon.

Windows users with msys2:

1. download the native Windows toolchain in ZIP format and unpack it somewhere (eg: c:\n64-toolchain). Avoid paths with spaces.
2. Open the Start menu, search "Environment" to open the Control Panel in the Environment Variables window. Create a new variable with name N64_INST and set as value the path to the folder where you unpacked the toolchain using forward slashes (eg: c:/n64-toolchain).
3. Get a copy of libdragon from GitHub (via git or how you prefer) and unpack it somewhere.
4. Open a MSYS2 MinGW x64 terminal (use the shortcut called like this), move to the directory where you unpacked libdragon (eg: cd /c/Users/Foo/libdragon).
5. Run pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-make git to install the dependencies
6. Run ./build.sh to build and install libdragon.

Linux users:

1. download either the toolchain in .deb format or toolchain in .rpm format. Install it as usual for your operating system. The packages will install the toolchain into /opt/libdragon, and will also create a script file in /etc/profile.d to automatically configure for you the environment variable $N64_INST=/opt/libdragon
2. Open a new terminal after installation. The shell should have run the script file and configured the system. Try echo $N64_INST to confirm the installation was successful.
3. Install standard build tools (GCC compiler) for your Linux system. In Debian and Ubuntu, you can install a package called build-essential that contains everything (sudo apt install build-essential). For Fedora, you must do yum install gcc gcc-c++.
4. Download libdragon (eg: git clone) and run ./build.sh to compile and install libdragon (it will be installed again under /opt/libdragon). The ./build.sh will ask for sudo when needed to install into /opt/libdragon.

Option 3: compile and install the toolchain from sources

Note

Building a toolchain from sources can take a long time. Time of 1 hr or more are not unexpected, especially if you don't have the latest gaming PC on the market.

Supported OS: Windows via WSL2 or msys2, Linux, macOS x86/arm

These instructions work for Linux, macOS (Intel / Apple Silicon) and Windows with WSL2 or msys2. WSL1 users must upgrade to WSL2 first.

1. Export the environment variable N64_INST to the path where you want your toolchain to be installed. For instance: export N64_INST=/opt/libdragon or export N64_INST=/usr/local.
2. If you are on macOS, make sure homebrew is installed.
3. Install the following packages that are needed: these are the Debian names, but they should be similar on all systems: build-essential (GCC, binutils, make, autotools, etc.), texinfo.
4. Make sure you have at least 7 GB of disk space available (notice that after build, only about 300 MB will be used, but during build a lot of space is required).
5. Enter the tools directory and Run ./build-toolchain.sh, let it build and install the toolchain. The process will take a while depending on your computer (1 hour is not unexpected).
6. Make sure that you still have the N64_INST variable pointing to the correct directory where the toolchain was installed (echo $N64_INST).
7. Run ./build.sh at the top-level. This will install libdragon, its tools, and also build all examples.

You are now ready to run the examples on your N64 or emulator.

Once you are sure everything is fine, you can delete the tools/toolchain/ directory, where the toolchain was built. This will free around 6 GB of space. You will only need the installed binaries in the N64_INST from now on.