PPSSPP on WSL

WSL or Windows Services for Linux is a convenient way to run a Linux VM on Windows. It's well-integrated and quite convenient.

Recently, it has even added graphics support and it's now possible to build and run PPSSPP on WSL2, which can be very useful for debugging - especially for running various tools that only exist or work better on Linux like valgrind, address-sanitizer etc.

Tips

  • Install VS Code on Windows (not in your WSL VM!)

  • Check out the PPSSPP repository:

    git clone [email protected]:hrydgard/ppsspp.git --recursive

  • Install the usual dependencies documented here (plus cmake).

  • Install at least the following VS Code extensions:

    • CodeLLDB (a debugger)
    • WSL
    • C/C++ Extension Pack

In your WSL directory where you checked out the PPSSPP git repo, from terminal, just:

code .

PPSSPP provides example debug configurations in .vscode/launch-example-wsl.json (and .vscode/launch-example.json for Mac/Linux). Copy one to .vscode/launch.json (the .vscode files you create are ignored by git) and adjust the paths in it.

The WSL example runs a build task called Build PPSSPP (WSL debug) before launching, which you need to add yourself in .vscode/tasks.json, for example running ./b.sh --debug. Use --release instead, or add an additional task, if desired.

Valgrind

Here's an example where we both use suppressions, and generate new ones (that you can then take from suppressions.log and simplify and copy to valgrind-wsl2.supp):

valgrind --suppressions=SDL/valgrind-wsl2.supp --gen-suppressions=all --log-file=suppressions.log build/PPSSPPSDL