Thursday, August 8, 2013

HEY! Let's compile Mednafen emulator for Ubuntu!

First things first we need to get the latest source from the Mednafen Forums. Usually the top post, no account needed to download.

Click here for the official Mednafen forums.

Now we'll want to Install some dependencies for compiling.

sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libasound2-dev libcdio-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsndfile1-dev zlib1g-dev  

Next we'll decompress the source. Don't forget to enter the directory the archive decompresses to before you run the compile command.

tar vxfj mednafen-<version>-wip.tar.bz2

And then compile the Mednafen source

./configure && make && sudo make install

After it finishes compiling and installing it's binaries you can fire it up by opening a terminal (yes, its a terminal based program. NO built in GUI) and typing in 'mednafen <rom name>'. The list of supported systems is staggering. Refer to the Mednafen homepage for the run down on what all it can do.

Don't Like the terminal? There are several GUI frontends for Mednafen. The one I recommend is called MFE, it can be found here. Note that while MFE is a great front end it's known to have a little bugger in it's syntax with versions of mednafen above 0.9.11. It's really easy to fix, info about it can be found here.

Screenie of MFE and Mednafen running the NES legend, Duck Tales.