Open main menu

Cross-compiling ScummVM on for Raspberry Pi

Installing the official Raspberry Pi cross-compiler on PC

We will clone the Raspberry Pi tools repository which includes the cross-compiler we need:

git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools.git It will get cloned to a directory called tools at your current location.

Add it to the path so we have the crosscompiler binaries available from our scummvm building directory. If my raspberrry pi tools repository ended cloned in tools at my home directory, I would do:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/tools/arm-bcm2708/arm-bcm2708hardfp-linux-gnueabi/bin

After adding the crosscompiler executables directory to the path, we should be able to run bcm2708hardfp-gcc, bcm2708hardfp-g++, etc... just try. They should yield an error because you pass them no input files, but that's expected. It's just a test so we know we've the crosscompiler installed and accesible.

Installing the needed Raspberry Pi headers and libraries on PC

We need to copy over the /usr, /lib and /opt directories from your Raspbian SD to your PC (the computer were you will do the cross-compilation), for the needed headers and libs to be available. Of course, you'll have to install any additonal libs from Raspbian running of the Pi before expecting them to be available, so if you compile scummvm with FLAC support, you should have installed the libflac development libs on the Pi first.

First we export the path where we will copy these into, and then we will manually copy them. I choose /opt/rpi_root, but any other path with the right permissions for your user and common sense is going to be ok:

mkdir -p /opt/rpi_root

cd <SD_mountpoint_directory>

cp -R usr lib opt $RPI_ROOT

export RPI_ROOT=/opt/rpi_root

Configuring ScummVM

Now we configure scummvm buildsystem so it knows what backend we want and where is our raspberry pi local sysroot living, containing the Raspberry Pi headers and libs the cross-compiler and linker will need. In this example configuration, we disable additional libs, and debug symbols since it's intended for final users.

Depending on whether we want dispmanx support, we would pass the --enable-dispmanx parameter to the configure script. For example, we would run configure like this to build scummvm with dispmanx support enabled:

./configure --host=raspberrypi --with-sdl-prefix=$RPI_ROOT/usr --disable-debug --enable-release --enable-optimizations --disable-mt32emu --disable-flac --disable-mad --disable-vorbis --disable-tremor --disable-fluidsynth --disable-taskbar --disable-timidity --disable-alsa

Remember you should have exported the RPI_ROOT enviroment variable previously. On the raspberrypi host, SDL2 will be always used since it provides graphics acceleration.

Compiling ScummVM

run "make clean" and then "make -j<n>", where n is the number of cores available on your compilation machine x2.

Installing ScummVM

Simply copy over the resulting scummvm executable to your Raspberry Pi sd. A good idea is to create an scummvm folder in your /home/pi directory, and put the executable there along with the games you want to use with it.