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====== The GameTank Emulator ======

The GameTank has an emulator that was developed alongside the hardware and continues to be improved as both a software development tool and a wrapper for GameTank binaries to run on modern desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

This page is specifically about the original emulator developed in C++ and SDL at https://github.com/clydeshaffer/gametankemulator

===== Get the emulator =====
==== Windows ====

=== Download latest windows build ===

Currently for the Windows version a prebuilt packages is created every 24h and available at [[https://gametank.zone/emulator/win/latest.php|this link]].

=== Building for windows ===

Building the GameTankEmulator is assumed here to be done under WSL, and you should have git already installed and set up.

Get the emulator source:
<code bash>
git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive
</code>

You'll also need SDL2 development files, at time of writing the emulator uses version 2.26.2 for MinGW
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-2.26.2
This should be extracted into the same parent folder that you cloned the GameTankEmulator repo
<code bash>
wget https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/download/release-2.26.2/SDL2-devel-2.26.2-mingw.tar.gz
tar -xvf SDL2-devel-2.26.2-mingw.tar.gz
</code>

Finally you'll also need the MinGW compiler suite for cross building from Linux to Windows
<code bash>
sudo apt install mingw-w64
</code>

Once you have the tools and libraries installed you should be able to build the emulator. 
For some reason when the windows version is launched from WSL it has a very long initial load time ONLY when the exe is stored in the WSL drive. Copying the exe file to a location in your normal windows drives such as C: and running it from there fixes the issue.

<code bash>
make OS="Windows_NT" XCOMP=yes SDL_ROOT=../SDL2-2.26.2/i686-w64-mingw32 -j 1
mkdir -p /mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/
unzip dist/GTE_Win32.zip -d /mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/
/mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/GameTankEmulator.exe ./roms/badapple.gtr
</code>

==== Mac ====

Building on OSX, for OSX is a bit more straightforward:

Get SDL:
<code bash>
brew install sdl2
</code>

Get and build the emulator:
<code bash>
git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive
make OS="macos"
./build/GameTankEmulator ./roms/badapple.gtr
</code>

==== Linux ====

Building on Linux, for Linux is also somewhat simple:

Get SDL:
<code bash>
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev
</code>

Get and build the emulator:
<code bash>
git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive
make OS="ubuntu"
./build/GameTankEmulator ./roms/badapple.gtr
</code>