BUILDING_MACOS.md

Building on macOS

N.B. C++17 is required to build the asset processing program that we use (ZAPD), so check your OS version can support this before proceeding.

1. Dependencies

For macOS, use Homebrew to install the following dependencies:

• coreutils
• make
• python3
• libpng
• bash
• clang-format

You can install them with the following commands:

brew update
brew install coreutils make python3 libpng bash clang-format

(The repository expects Homebrew-installed programs to be either linked correctly in $PATH etc. or in their default locations.)

2. Building mips-linux-binutils

The following instructions are written for MacOS users but should apply to any Unix-like system, with maybe some modifications at the end regarding the bash_profile.

Create destination dir for binutils

sudo mkdir -p /opt/cross

Create and enter local working dir

mkdir ~/binutils-tmp
cd ~/binutils-tmp

Get and extract binutils source

wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.35.tar.bz2
tar xjf binutils-2.35.tar.bz2

(You may find this command does not work: if so, just access the URL in a browser and save it to ~/binutils-tmp.)

Create and enter a build directory

mkdir build-binutils
cd build-binutils

Configure the build

../binutils-2.35/configure --target=mips-linux-gnu --prefix=/opt/cross --disable-gprof --disable-gdb --disable-werror

Make and install binutils

make -j
sudo make install

Edit your ~/.bash_profile/~/.zsh_profile (or whichever shell you use) to add the new binutils binaries to the system PATH

echo "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/cross/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile

Reload ~/.bash_profile (or just launch a new terminal tab)

source ~/.bash_profile

If this worked, you can now delete the temporary directory ~/binutils-tmp.

3. Final note

Apple's version of make is very out-of-date, so you should use the brew-installed gmake in place of make in this repo from now on.

You should now be able to continue from step 2 of the Linux instructions.