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
bash
clang-format
libxml2
libiconv

You can install them with the following commands:

bash

brew update
brew install coreutils make python3 bash clang-format libxml2 libiconv

(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

bash

sudo mkdir -p /opt/cross

Create and enter local working dir

bash

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

Get and extract binutils source

bash

curl -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.46.0.tar.xz
tar xjf binutils-2.46.0.tar.xz

Create and enter a build directory

bash

mkdir build-binutils
cd build-binutils

Configure the build

bash

../binutils-2.46.0/configure --target=mips-linux-gnu --prefix=/opt/cross --with-system-zlib --disable-gprof --disable-gdb --disable-werror

Make and install binutils

bash

make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

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

bash

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

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

bash

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Apple's version of make is very out-of-date, so you should use the brew-installed gmake in place of make in this repo from now on.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

4. Building GCC (optional)

If you'd like to compile with GCC instead of IDO (e.g. for modding), you can build it from source similarly to how we built binutils:

Install dependences

bash

brew install gcc@15 gmp isl libmpc mpfr

Create and enter local working dir

bash

mkdir ~/gcc-tmp
cd ~/gcc-tmp

Get and extract gcc source

bash

curl -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-15.2.0/gcc-15.2.0.tar.xz
tar xvf gcc-15.2.0.tar.xz

Create and enter a build directory

bash

mkdir build-gcc
cd build-gcc

Configure the build

bash

CC=gcc-15 CXX=g++-15 ../gcc-15.2.0/configure --target=mips-linux-gnu --prefix=/opt/cross --disable-nls --enable-languages=c --with-gmp=$(brew --prefix)/opt/gmp --with-mpfr=$(brew --prefix)/opt/mpfr --with-mpc=$(brew --prefix)/opt/libmpc --with-isl=$(brew --prefix)/opt/isl

Make and install gcc

bash

CC=gcc-15 CXX=g++-15 make all-gcc -j$(nproc)
sudo make install-gcc

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