Development

This document is intended for developers interested in contributing to segatools. Please read this document before you start developing/contributing.

Goals

We want you to understand what this project is about and its goals. The following list serves as a guidance for all developers to identify valuable contributions for this project. As the project evolves, these goals might do as well.

Allow running Sega arcade (rhythm) games on arbitrary hardware
- Emulate required software and hardware features
- Provide means to cope with incompatibility issues resulting from using a different software platform (e.g. version of Windows).
Provide an API for custom interfaces and configuring fundamental application features

Development environment

The following tooling is required in order to build this project.

Tooling

Linux / MacOSX

git
make
mingw-w64
docker (optional)

On MacOSX, you can use homebrew or macports to install these packages.

Windows

TODO

IDE

Ultimately, you are free to use whatever you feel comfortable with for development. The following is our preferred development environment which we run on a Linux distribution of our choice:

Visual Studio Code with the following extensions
- C/C++
- C++ Intellisense

Further tools for testing and debugging

Debugger: Can be part of your reverse engineering IDE of your choice or stand-along like OllyDbg
apitrace: Trace render calls to graphics APIs like D3D and OpenGL. This tool allows you to record and re-play render calls of an application with frame-by-frame debugging. Very useful to analyze the render pipeline or debug graphicial glitches

Building

The root Makefile contains various targets that allow you to build the project easily.

Local build

For a local build, you need to install Meson and a recent build of MinGW-w64. Then you can start the build process:

make build

Build output will be located in build/build32 and build/build64 folders.

Cleanup local build

make clean

Create distribution package (zip file)

make dist

The output will be located in build/zip.

Build and create distribution package using docker

You can also build using docker which avoids having to setup a full development environment if you are just interested in building binaries of the latest changes. Naturally, this requires you to have the docker daemon installed.

make build-docker

Once completed successfully, the build output is located in the build/docker/zip sub-folder.

Building with Docker Desktop on Windows

Install WSL2
Install Docker Desktop
Run Docker Desktop to start the Docker Engine
Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and cd to your segatools folder
Run docker-build.bat
Once completed successfully, build output is located in the build/docker/zip sub-folder.

Building with Docker on Windows using WSL2

Install WSL2
Regarding Linux distribution, we recommend using Ubuntu 20.04
Run the "Ubuntu 20.04 LTS" App which opens a Linux shell
Install make and docker by running
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install make docker.io
Add the current user to the docker group that you don't have to run docker commands with root: sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER
Run the docker daemon in the background: sudo dockerd > /dev/null 2>&1 &
Navigate to your segatools folder. If it is located on the C: drive, WSL automatically provides a mountpoint for that under /mnt/c, e.g. cd /mnt/c/segatools (if the folder segatools is located under C:\segatools on Windows).
Build segatools: make build-docker
Once completed successfully, build output is located in the build/docker/zip sub-folder

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