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 Bundle(s) / APK(s) -> Build APK

Then run:

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

Better ADB logs

Use the following very long command line to cleanly filter out PPSSPP-relevant logs:

adb logcat -s DEBUG AndroidRuntime PPSSPPNativeActivity PPSSPP NativeGLView NativeRenderer NativeSurfaceView PowerSaveModeReceiver InputDeviceState PpssppActivity CameraHelper

More instructions here.

Running PPSSPPHeadless in Docker on github CI

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...

Profiling on Android

In Android Studio, go Run -> Profiler: Run Android as profilable (low overhead). Then choose Find CPU Hotspots.

Launch.json in VS Code

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.

Running in WSL2 with full graphics support

See this Stack Overflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79151910/how-to-fix-errors-in-wsl-gui

With this, both OpenGL and Vulkan will work in WSL. The latter works through dzn, a Vulkan-on-top-of-DX12 wrapper.

Testing PPSSPP's websocket debugger support

From 1.20, there's a new script in scripts/ in the root of the code tree.

Use as follows:

python scripts\websocket-test.py 56244 gpu.stats.get 3

where 56244 is the configured port, and gpu.stats.get is the command you want to test, and 3 is the number of seconds you want to wait for additional messages.