Compilation guide (Android from Linux) - GregorR/RetroArch GitHub Wiki

Prerequisites

You need a complete android development environment ready to develop native apps. That means you have:

• Android SDK
• Android NDK
• The ant tool

Use Google to figure out how to install that and make sure the appropriate executables from the above are in your path variable.
These instructions have been tested under Linux (Fedora 20). They may also work in windows with cygwin.

Getting the code

git clone https://github.com/libretro/libretro-super.git
cd libretro-super
./libretro-fetch.sh              

./libretro-fetch.sh can fail on fork() calls, repeat until all are up to date
For ./libretro-build-android-mk.sh, some cores may fail to compile (g++ "Argument list too long" error). See https://github.com/libretro/libretro-super/issues/10

Building the cores

NOCLEAN=1 ./libretro-build-android-mk.sh 

You can omit NOCLEAN=1 if you'd like to perform make clean on every core's repo before building each.

Building RetroArch

The RetroArch repo is fetched into the libretro-super folder as retroarch by ./libretro-fetch.sh above.

You first need to fetch the submodules for it. (will not be necessary when PR #3568 is merged)

cd retroarch
git submodule update --init

Then set up the android projects.

cd pkg/android/phoenix
android update project --path .
android update project --path libs/googleplay/
android update project --path libs/appcompat/ # this doesn't seem to exist anymore

Now edit local.properties to point to the location of your ndk directory by adding a line like this: ndk.dir=/complete/path/to/android-ndk-r9d

Finally, copy the cores, assets and overlays to the right place and build it.

mkdir -p assets/cores
mkdir assets/overlays
cp ../../../../dist/android/armeabi-v7a/* assets/cores/ #replace armeabi-v7a here by mips or x86 for those targets
cp -r ../../../../dist/info/ assets/
cp -r ../../../../retroarch/media/overlays/* assets/overlays/
ant clean
ant debug

If all goes well, this will spit out an .apk, bin/retroarch-debug.apk. Put it on your device with

adb install -r bin/retroarch-debug.apk