Building for Mac OS X - Sonicadvance1/dolphin GitHub Wiki

Minimum OS X and Xcode versions


Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) or newer is required to build Dolphin. Mavericks is recommended.

You will need to install "Command Line Tools for Xcode". Installing Xcode itself is optional if you have installed the Command Line Tools.

Checkout and compile Dolphin


To checkout Dolphin's source:

git clone https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu ~/dolphin-emu
cd ~/dolphin-emu

To build with CMake (optionally verbose): Download and install CMake if you don't have it.

CMake Notes

The -j option can be passed to make in order to compile multiple objects at once. A good rule of thumb is number of CPU cores plus one. For example, on a quad core CPU make -j5 would be a good choice.

You can execute cmake -L to view the options that Dolphin's CMake environment supports, as well as their current and possible settings.

If you have any problems compiling, use the verbose option (shown above) to give more detail. If you report a problem, at a minimum include the last screen-full of lines.

Optional: Ninja


Ninja is a replacement for Make which is a bit faster for a Dolphin-sized project and is worth considering if you intend to rebuild frequently.

After installing it, pass -G Ninja to cmake and use 'ninja' instead of 'make' (note that ninja is -j by default).

By default, clang won't show color diagnostics when not invoked from a TTY, and ninja buffers compiler output through a pipe to avoid interleaving issues. To fix this, pass to cmake:

-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Xclang -fcolor-diagnostics"

Keeping up to date


All you need to do to update to the latest Dolphin revision is the following:

cd ~/dolphin-emu/build
git pull
make && open Binaries/*