Daedalus PSP under OSX

I mentioned a few days ago that I've recently bought a Macbook Pro. I've never owned a Mac before so it's been a really interesting experience learning my way around. Initially I was planing on dual booting Windows XP via Boot Camp, but I quickly found that I could do almost everything I need to in OSX. I did install Parallels Desktop, I rarely find myself running any Windows apps.

One of the main things I need for day to day 'work' is the ability to compile and run Daedalus. The rest of this article describes the process of setting up the PSPSDK under OSX, and compiling Daedalus PSP for the first time. This post is really aimed at people who are interested in compiling Daedalus for themselves on OSX. Hopefully it will also be useful for other PSP homebrew developers who have been having problems getting the PSPSDK set up under OSX.

To install the PSPSDK I largely followed this guide on the ps2dev.org forums. I already had XCode and fink installed. Fink complained when I tried to install all the listed packages, and I had to remove one of them from the command line (I think it was autogen, but I can't really remember now.)

I've been using the most recent psptoolchain script, which was updated a few weeks ago, and I had to make a couple of modifications. In depends/check-ncurses.sh I had to change the check for ncurses to look for the OSX .dyliib file:

## Check for a ncurses library.
ls /usr/lib/libncurses.a 1> /dev/null ||
    ls /usr/lib/libncurses.dll.a ||
    { echo "ERROR: Install ncurses before continuing."; exit 1; }

became:

## Check for a ncurses library.
ls /usr/lib/libncurses.a 1> /dev/null ||
    ls /usr/lib/libncurses.dll.a ||
    ls /usr/lib/libncurses.dylib ||
    { echo "ERROR: Install ncurses before continuing."; exit 1; }

Secondly I had to make this change to scripts/001-binutils-2.16.1.sh. As urchin mentions on the ps2dev.org forum, ".m" is the extension for Objective C files in OSX. The '-r' tells make to ignore the built-in implicit rules, and everything works fine:

So:

## Compile and install.
make clean && make -j 2 && make install && make clean || { exit 1; }

became:

## Compile and install.
make clean && make -r -j 2 && make install && make clean || { exit 1; }

(note the '-r' flag on the second invocation of make.)

I left the psptoolchain script doing its stuff for a couple of hours, and when I came back to it everything seemed to have completed and installed correctly.

The next step was to get Daedalus PSP compiling. Somewhat naively I assumed Daedalus PSP would compile out of the box on OSX. As it turns out, I had to make a few small changes to get everything compiling nicely.

Firstly, I had to update the makefile so that it directly referenced psp-gcc and psp-g++. Normally, I build Daedalus PSP through a Visual Studio Makefile project, and I had used a couple of scripts from the ps2dev.org forums to format GCC's output into a format that Visual Studio understands, so that double clicking on an error in the output opens the corresponding file in the editor. I found a better way to handle this, so I changed the CC/CXX macros to refer to the original pspsdk tools.

The main problem I encountered was my arbitrary use of backslashes instead of forward slashes in #include directives, e.g.:

#include "Core\CPU.h"

should be:

#include "Core/CPU.h"

Another subtle error came from the way that I was instantiating static functions from templated classes which are defined in a namespace. An example will probably help explain. Here's the basic outline of the class I use to implement the singleton pattern:

namespace daedalus
{
 template< class T>
 class CSingleton
 {
 public:
  static bool Create();

  static T * Get() { return mpInstance; }

 private:
  T * mpInstance;
 };
}

The Create method for the singleton class is then implemented like this:

template<> bool CSingleton< CController >::Create()
{
 DAEDALUS_ASSERT_Q(mpInstance == NULL);
 
 mpInstance = new IController();

 return true;
}

For some reason this started failing when compiling Daedalus PSP under OSX:

Source/Core/PIF.cpp: At global scope:
Source/Core/PIF.cpp:250: error: specialization of 'static bool
 daedalus::CSingleton::Create() [with T = CController]' in different namespace
Source/Core/PIF.cpp:250: error:   from definition of 'static bool
 daedalus::CSingleton::Create() [with T = CController]'

Rather than being an OSX issue, I suspect that the reason this error started occurring was actually due to the PSPSDK using an updated version of GCC which is a bit stricter than the version I was using on Windows. Regardless, the fix was easy - the code just needed to be wrapped in the 'daedalus' namespace:

namespace daedalus
{
template<> bool CSingleton< CController >::Create()
{
 DAEDALUS_ASSERT_Q(mpInstance == NULL);
 
 mpInstance = new IController();

 return true;
}
}

(I've recently been going off the singleton pattern, but that's another story :)

With these changes Daedalus PSP compiles perfectly under OSX. On my 2.4 GHz Macbook Pro it takes just under 50 seconds. On my 2.4GHz Windows machine it takes over 2 minutes to compile, so I'm very impressed with the results.

I believe I've checked in all the required changes to the Daedalus SVN repository on SourceForge. If you decide to try compiling Daedalus PSP under OSX, let me know how you get on via the comments page (I'll be rejecting any off-topic comments to try and keep the discussion constructive)

-StrmnNrmn