Patches and a build script to make Mednafen's debugger easier to read without eyestrain.
This project supports Mednafen 1.27.1, and it has been tested on both Microsoft Windows and Debian linux.
The patches are released under the GPL license, in order to match Mednafen's own license.
The Mednafen emulator is best-of-class for emulating a number of consoles, especially the Sony PlayStation, NEC PC Engine, NEC PC-FX, Nintendo VirtualBoy and Bandai WonderSwan.
It has an excellent debugger built-in that makes it a wonderful tool for developing homebrew games or language-translation patches.
Unfortunately, the debugger defaults to using low-resolution 5x7 pixel fonts that are poorly defined, and then displays them on small pages that 640x480 pixel-or-less in size.
This makes the debugging screens very hard to read, especially on modern high-resolution monitors.
In order to avoid eyestrain and annoyance, this project patches the Mednafen source to use slightly larger and better-defined fonts, and then to display them on larger 800x600 pixel pages.
The result looks like this (using the PC Engine debugger as an example) ...
Compared to the original display ...
Although all of Mednafen's emulated consoles (that have debuggers) are patched, the included build script only compiles Mednafen to include the PlayStation, PC Engine, PC-FX, VirtualBoy and WonderSwan.
The Sega Saturn emulation is currently disabled because it is still considered to be in beta-test, and the debugger still lacks information.
If you want to build Mednafen for all of its supported platforms, then just edit the build script to change the configuration.
Source code ...
<some_directory>/src/mednafen/
Mednafen build output ...
<some_directory>/bin/mednafen/
Please take particular note that this means that the output will be put in a directory above the source directory.
If you want to change this, you can edit the build script.
This has changed from earlier versions of the mednafen-happyeyes project, and builds for Windows are now cross-compiled on Linux, in the same way that the official Mednafen project releases are built.
See this thread on the Mednafen forum for more details ... https://forum.fobby.net/index.php?t=msg&&th=2004&goto=6452#msg_6452
Note: This change has been made because recent MSYS2 builds of Mednafen have produced executables that crash on startup.
Install the base MSYS2 system, either 32-bit or 64-bit, from here.
Install the "base-devel" and "git" packages.
pacman -Sy
pacman -S --needed base-devel git
Build the toolchain (which downloads the Mednafen source and installs some prerequisite libraries).
cd <some_directory>/src/mednafen/
./build_mednafen.sh
Clean up the temporary directories.
./build_mednafen.sh clean
Install the "build-essential" package to get the compiler.
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Install the static libraries that are needed to build Mednafen.
sudo apt-get install pkg-config libasound2-dev libsdl2-dev libsndfile1-dev zlib1g-dev
Build the toolchain.
cd <some_directory>/src/mednafen/
./build_mednafen.sh
Clean up the temporary directories.
./build_mednafen.sh clean