Installation

You will find in this page detailed instructions to install PVSnesLib latest release on Windows or Linux (ubuntu or other debian distribution) or MacOS environment.

To follow this guide, you will need :

• the latest release of PVsneslib

and these required dependencies

• msys2 if you are on Windows environment
• a text editor to write your code
• an emulator to test the roms

All other required dependencies to use it are provided in the archive to download. If you want to go further and build the latest version from sources, you can follow this page which explain how to do it.

As PVSneslib works on different operating system, it is hard to cover all cases, specifically on Linux which have a lot of differences. As you have probably a package management tool installed, it is more easy to do it from command line and i will provide some instructions using the apt-get tool which download packages from APT repository.

Feel free to adapt it for your version !

Required dependencies

MSYS2 (step required for Windows only)

PVsneslib need application to run scripts and makefiles like you do on Linux environments. If you work on Linux, please ignore this step but on Windows, you will need a tool to do it : MSYS2 UCRT64

You can download it from here. Just follow the instructions from step 1 to 5.

When MSYS2 is installed, we want first to be sure that all is updated. Then, we have to install the make tool to compile all samples available.

In the MSYS2 UCRT64 terminal, run:

• pacman -Suuy to update the rest of the packages (allowing downgrades)
• pacman -S make to install the make command

You MUST restart MSYS2.

Please remember that:

• Always use MSYS2 UCRT64 terminal windows to compile your code.

Text editor

Any text editor will allow you to write your code but you will need to use a terminal beside to execute the make commands to build your project.

For convenience reasons, we recommend to use Visual Studio Code which is cross platform. To do it, you can follow this Wiki page.

Emulator

A lot of emulators for the Super Nintendo SNES are available and the behaviour of your code can be different depending the one you use. If you are on Windows, we directly recommend to use no$snes which contains useful functionalities.

Otherwise, you can use Mesen which is a high-accuracy emulator for Windows and Linux.

You can use any other emulator you want but in all cases, it is important to test you rom on different one which which works as nearest possible than the real hardware.

Installing PVSnesLib

From the version 3.5.0 (May 2022), PVsneslib is now packaged in one zip to ease the installation.

The first thing you need is to download the latest version of PVsneslib then extract it where you want. Then, you need to create a new environment variable PVSNESLIB_HOME to provide the path to this directory.

Please remember that PVSNESLIB_HOME variable (or any folder you will create under its tree) CANNOT contains spaces.

On windows

You could extract it under C:/snesdev directory. You can set PVSNESLIB_HOME to /c/snesdev by using this command line: setx PVSNESLIB_HOME "/c/snesdev", or you can set it manually like it is shown below:

Be careful: the path must be in Unix style (/c/ instead of c:\) on Windows too ! Do not forget that if you change your environment variable, you will probably need to launch a new command prompt to take it into account.

On Linux

Depending your distribution, you have different ways to create this variable.

If you want to declare the variable only for the current terminal session, you can execute :

export PVSNESLIB_HOME=/path/to/pvsneslib

But if you do not want to execute this command before using the library, you can add it to the file .profile located in your home directory.

Open the terminal and execute this commands after editing the path with your own:

cd && echo export PVSNESLIB_HOME=/path/to/pvsneslib >> .profile

It will add this variable to your .profile file, you now need to reload it to take this change into account.

To do it, just launch source ~/.profile command in your terminal.

If you want to use the ~ character to point on your home directory, you can also do it like that : export PVSNESLIB_HOME=~/pvsneslib

On MacOS

You can accomplish it by using the following command in your terminal in your pvsneslib directory:

export PVSNESLIB_HOME=$(pwd)

Please remember that:

• PVSNESLIB_HOME environment variable (or any folder you will create under its tree) CANNOT contains spaces.
• This environment variable is not persistent. It means you'll have to set it if you launch a new terminal, or close the current one.

Don't worry, if you forget, you will be notified of an error message by running the make command.

Then, install brew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Finally, install brew package:

brew install gnu-sed

For gnu-sed, we need to set it as your default sed command. Let's do it by updating the PATH environment.

A quick way to do this is by adding PATH at the end of your ~/.zshrc

Edit this file and add this the end, or update the existing environment variable PATH if it already exists by using your favorite file editor (nano, vim, ...).

# Some people mention that the path is now "/opt/homebrew/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin", please confirm us!
PATH="/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
export PATH

Save the file and reload it:

source ~/.zshrc

Now gnu-sed will be used by default because it precedes all other sed commands installed on your system.

It is ready !

Now everything is installed correctly, you can validate that it works correctly by compiling the hello world sample. Just go under your installation path, snes-examples > hello_world and run the make command.

If you encounter an issue, join us on Discord to get help!