Development tips & tricks

Installing on very old phones that Android Studio won't talk to

For ancient phones that can no longer install directly from Android Studio, choose:

  • Build->Build Bundles/APKs/Build APK

Then run:

adb install android/build/outputs/apk/normal/optimized/android-normal-optimized.apk

Running PPSSPPHeadless in Docker

Here's an example setup. Note that --shm-size=8g (or bigger) is critically important!

build_test_headless_alpine:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: alpine:latest
    options: --shm-size=8g

Compat.ini on Android

It's inconvenient to directly edit compat.ini since it's built into the APK's asset subdirectory, but you can put a separate compat.ini in your PSP/SYSTEM directory. It will be automatically merged with the one from assets in the APK.

Checking your code optimizations

The quickest way to check what machine code was generated when you compiled some C++ function, is to, in Visual Studio, set a breakpoint on the code, then run until it gets hit, and then press Ctrl+Alt+D to show disassembly. Best used to verify that your SIMD instrinsics don't do something silly, like reload a matrix for every vertex for example...

Launch.json in vscode

Here's a quick .vscode/launch.json one for debugging on Mac:

{
        "version": "0.2.0",
        "configurations": [
                {
                        "name": "(lldb) Launch",
                        "type": "cppdbg",
                        "request": "launch",
                        "program": "",
                        "osx": {
                                "program": "${workspaceFolder}/build/PPSSPPSDL.app/Contents/MacOS/PPSSPPSDL"
                        },
                        "linux": {
                                "program": "${workspaceRoot}/build/PPSSPPSDL"
                        },
                        "args": [],
                        "stopAtEntry": false,
                        "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
                        "environment": [],
                        "externalConsole": false,
                        "MIMode": "lldb"
                }
        ]
}

Can be improved a lot, like currently it doesn't even perform the build.

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