Windows WSL2 Installation

Installing Simulant within a WSL2 environment allows you to use Simulant as if you're running on Linux.

Note that, as far as Simulant commands are concerned, the native platform is Linux, and not Windows. If you want to run your application natively on Windows you'll need to explicitly specify 'windows' as the platform when running the simulant tool.

Prerequisites

WSL2 (Window Subsystem for Linux) must be installed and configured before starting the Simulant installation process. Once WSL2 is enabled, you should install the latest Ubuntu LTS release.

The next step is to install the Docker Desktop for Windows with WSL support. This will run a Docker service that Simulant can use to build for non-Linux platforms (including Windows itself).

Once these Windows tools are installed (you'll need to reboot!) you can open up your Ubuntu shell from the Start Menu, and start configuring the Linux environment.

The remainder of this tutorial is within the Ubuntu terminal environment

Installing dependencies

Inside the Ubuntu terminal, run the following command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install python3-pip git python3-setuptools cmake build-essential libsdl2-dev libopenal-dev docker.io

Fixing the $PATH

For some reason, Ubuntu doesn't add user-installed Python executables to the $PATH so you'll need to do that for the simulant command to work once installed:

echo "PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile

Authorising Docker

You must be a member of the docker group to use the docker command.

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

You'll need to log out and log back in for this to take effect (easiest to reboot to be sure!)

Installation

Next, you need to install the simulant-tools pip package:

pip3 install -U --user git+https://gitlab.com/simulant/simulant-tools.git

One installation is complete, you will have access to the simulant command.

Downloading the Windows SDK Docker image

Because you'll likely want to build a native Windows executable, you should go ahead and pull the latest Simulant Windows SDK Docker image.

docker pull kazade/windows-sdk

Creating your first project

Getting started is easy:

$ simulant start myprojectname
$ cd myprojectname
$ simulant run windows --rebuild

That's it!

Updating to latest Simulant

Simulant is under heavy development (and unstable), it is recommended you regularly update to get the latest fixes:

$ simulant update

Building for the Dreamcast

To build for the Dreamcast you must have Docker and have downloaded the Docker kazade/dreamcast-sdk container.

Then, simply:

$ simulant package dreamcast

This command will take a while on first run as it downloads the Docker image

This will generate a .cdi image ready to burn. If you have 'lxdream' installed, you can run the CDI:

$ simulant run dreamcast