Installation
You will find in this page detailed instructions to install PVSnesLib latest release on Windows or Linux (ubuntu or other debian distribution) environment.
Before continuing, please keep in mind that PVsneslib works only on 32 bits system for now. To avoid conflicts between versions, we recommend to install required dependencies in 32 bits when it is applicable (for msys and gcc).
To follow this guide, you will need :
- the latest release of PVsneslib
and these required dependencies
- msys if you are on Windows environment
- GCC for some tools
- python 3 to optimize code
- 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 !
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 : MSYS. You can download it from portabledev.com (the official Alekmaul’s website, developer of the library) or you can find newest version easily on internet.
You can install it everywhere on your computer but the path need to be added in the PATH environment variable to works correctly with PVSneslib.
Other tools as git bash or cygwin are not compatible for now.
Depending on the tools already installed on your computer, you may need to install GCC too. For example, you will have to install it if you encounter this error building projects which use smconv tool (like the mario-like sample) :
It is also necessary if you want to build yourself some tools in devkitsnes (like smconv !).
You can download the latest version of the tool here but we recommend you to get the 32 bit one, as we advised you for other tools!
As explained before, i will show the command line using apt-get tool.
By running this command line, you will have gcc :
sudo apt install gcc
To confirm, gcc-multilib seems to be mandatory to use gfx2snes. If someone can confirm us this point, we will update this page
Download and install the latest version of python 3 compatible with your OS version.
You just need to run :
sudo apt install python3
Python is used to optimize the code produced, it needs to be added in your path and accessible directly from the python command. If the command python --version does not work on your computer, you will have issues while using the script in PVsneslib.
Please note that the code is still compatible with Python 2 but we do not recommend to use this old version.
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.
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 usefull functionalities.
Otherwise, you can use Mesen-S 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 wich works as nearest possible than the real hardware.
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.
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.
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
If you want to use the ~ character to point on your home directory, you can also do it like that : export PVSNESLIB_HOME=~/pvsneslib
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!