Building the required toolchains for Sega Dreamcast development: Difference between revisions

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== DRAFT ==
#REDIRECT [[Getting Started with Dreamcast development]]
In order to develop for the Sega Dreamcast console, you will need 3 different toolchains:
* A sh-elf toolchain, which is the main toolchain. It targets the CPU of the Dreamcast, i.e. the Hitachi SH-4 CPU (SuperH).
* An arm-eabi toolchain, which is the toolchain used only for the Yamaha Super Intelligent Sound Processor (AICA). This processor is based on an ARM7 core.
* The host toolchain from your computer in order to produce some additional tools (i.e. the regular gcc of your computer).
 
The sh-elf and arm-eabi toolchains may be produced by the dc-chain tool provided with KallistiOS.
 
This package contains a Makefile which both simplifies building the whole
Sega Dreamcast toolchain, and gives you substantial control.
The toolchain is composed by:
 
 
 
The dc-chain Makefile is ready to build everything you need to compile
KallistiOS and then develop for the Sega Dreamcast system.
 
About toolchain components versions
Components that are included in a toolchain are:
* Binutils (mainly ld plus other tools)
* GNU Compiler Collection (gcc)
* Newlib (mainly libc plus other libraries)
* GNU Debugger (gdb) - Optional
 
As we are building two toolchains (sh-elf and arm-eabi), all these
components will be installed twice, for both targets.
Speaking about the best versions to use for the Sega Dreamcast development,
they are already declared in the Makefile. This is particulary true for gcc:
the best version to use at this time is the 4.7.3. We know that today this
version is pretty old but greater versions have serious
issues so it's better
to stick with that version.
Plus, gcc's bugtracker has a lot of bugs marked as [6/7/8/9 Regression] for
the sh-elf target which have not been resolved. Newer isn't always better,
especially with gcc targets that aren't high-priority.
 
Advanced options
You may attempt to spawn multiple jobs with make. Using make -j4 is
recommended for speeding up the building of the toolchain. There is an option
inside the Makefile to set the number of jobs for the building phases.
Set the makejobs variable in the Makefile to whatever you would normally
feel the need to use on the command line, and it will do the right thing.
In the old times, this option may breaks things, so, if you run into
trouble, you should clear this variable and try again with just one
job running.
On MinGW/MSYS environment, it has been confirmed that multiple jobs breaks
the toolchain, so please don't try to do that under this environment. This
option is disabled by default in this scenario. This doesn't apply to the
others environments, including MinGW-w64/MSYS2.
 
Usage
Before you start, please browse the ./doc directory and check if they are
full instructions for building the whole toolchain for your environment.
 
Making the toolchain
Below you will find some generic instructions:
 
 
Change the variables in the User Configuration section of the Makefile
to match your environment. They can be overridden at the command line as
well. Please note, a lot of conditional instructions have been added, so it
should work most of the time just out-of-the-box for your environment.
 
 
Then execute the following for preparing the sources:
./download.sh
./unpack.sh
 
 
Finally, input (for BSD, please use gmake instead):
make
 
 
Depending of your environment, this can take a bunch of hours. So please be
patient!
If anything goes wrong, check the output in logs/.
 
Making the GNU Debugger (gdb)
For the sh-elf toolchain, if you want to use the GNU Debugger (gdb),
you can make it by entering:
make gdb
This will install gdb in the sh-elf toolchain (gdb is used with
dcload/dc-tool programs, which are part of KallistiOS too).
 
Removing all useless files
After the toolchain compilation, you can cleanup everything by entering:
./cleanup.sh
This will save a lot of space.
 
Final note
Please see the comments at the top of the Makefile for more build options.

Latest revision as of 17:04, 4 June 2023

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