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.
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
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
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
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!)
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.
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
Getting started is easy:
$ simulant start myprojectname
$ cd myprojectname
$ simulant run windows --rebuild
That's it!
Simulant is under heavy development (and unstable), it is recommended you regularly update to get the latest fixes:
$ simulant update
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