In this article, we’ll look at what it takes to set up a development environment for the nintendo switch. The steps here describe the (un)officially supported way to build Homebrew.

You will need a supported OS (ArchLinux, Debian/Ubuntu, MacOS, or Windows 10 build 17046+), and a Switch with the 3.0.0 firmware.

This guide also expects the user to be comfortable with a terminal. If you do not know the basics of the terminal (bash, ls, cd, git…), you might want to go look for a tutorial online first.

Prerequiste

Some OSes will require some tools to be installed before continuing on:

• MacOS users will need to install Homebrew, a package manager. We’ll be using this to cleanly install all the other tools.
• Windows 10 users will need to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can check Microsoft’s Guide. Note that only the Ubuntu WSL is tested. From here on, Windows users can follow the same rules as Ubuntu, typing the commands in the WSL bash.

Finally, we’ll want to install git, as that’s what we’ll use to download the Reswitched tools.

• MacOS: brew install git
• ArchLinux: sudo pacman -Syu git
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install git

Libtransistor

Libtransistor is the low-level library to access the switch functionality. Basically an unofficial version of the Nintendo SDK. Libtransistor relies on the clang5 compiler (instead of gcc), which should be massively easier to setup. You must use clang version 5, libtransistor will not work with any earlier versions.

Dealing with the deps

To start with, you’ll need to install a collection of base development tools, along with llvm5/clang5, python3 and cmake.

• For MacOS, run brew install python cmake llvm squashfs.

  For compatibility reasons, llvm is installed under /usr/local/opt/llvm to avoid conflicting with the rest of the system. You should add that to your PATH : echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile.

• For ArchLinux, install one of the AUR packages (libtransistor-bin or libtransistor-git) or simply run sudo pacman -Syu base-devel python python-pip cmake clang lld

• For Ubuntu/Debian, you’ll need to add the LLVM repository into /etc/apt/sources.list. You’ll need to find the repositories that match your OS version on the LLVM website. For instance for Ubuntu Xenial (16.04), you’d add the following to your sources.list file :

  deb http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial main
  deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial main
  # 4.0
  deb http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial-4.0 main
  deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial-4.0 main
  # 5.0
  deb http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial-5.0 main
  deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/xenial/ llvm-toolchain-xenial-5.0 main
  

  You should also fetch the LLVM signature key :

  wget -O - https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key|sudo apt-key add -
  # Fingerprint: 6084 F3CF 814B 57C1 CF12 EFD5 15CF 4D18 AF4F 7421
  

  And finally, install all the softwares :

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install build-essential automake autoconf python3-setuptools squashfs-tools python3 python3-dev python3-pip cmake clang-5.0 lld-5.0
  

Installing libtransistor

The recommended way to install install libtransistor is through the binary distibutions. If you have a need to be on the unstable branch. Then continue down to “Building libtransistor itself”. For Arch the simplest thing to do is install libtransistor-bin from the AUR. For every other distribution, follow the rest of the instructions. First you need to obtain a copy of libtransistor. The easiest way to that is go to libtransistor releases and download the most recent version. For example wget https://github.com/reswitched/libtransistor/releases/download/vXXX/libtransistor_vXXX.tar.gz. Replace XXX(both) with whatever the most recent version is.

cd path/to/the/download/location
sudo mkdir -p /opt/libtransistor
sudo tar -C /opt/libtransistor -xvzf libtransistor_vXXX.tar.gz ./

You should probably set the LIBTRANSISTOR_HOME environment variable to your libtransistor folder, as this is how make will find where libtransistor is. You can do that by writing export LIBTRANSISTOR_HOME=/path/to/libtransistor/dist in your shell’s RC file (~/.bashrc for instance). The AUR packages put it in /etc/profile.d/libtransistor.sh.

Building libtransistor itself

With the dependencies out of the way, you’ll need to actually clone and build libtransistor.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/reswitched/libtransistor

git clone --recursive https://github.com/reswitched/libtransistor-base
cd libtransistor-base
# Install the python dependencies. On Arch Linux
pip install -r requirements.txt
# On everything else
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# Build libtransistor. For MacOS and Arch Linux
make
# For Ubuntu/Debian
make LLVM_POSTFIX=-5.0
cp -r dist ../libtransistor/
cd ../libtransistor
# Build libtransistor. For MacOS and Arch Linux
make
# For Ubuntu/Debian
make LLVM_POSTFIX=-5.0

A small note on the Ubuntu/Debian users : Each time I mention make to compile an NRO, you will need to set LLVM_POSTFIX=-5.0 afterwards. Otherwise, it will use the wrong version and clang, and will probably result in compile errors.

This will compile libtransistor, along with a bunch of supporting libraries (newlib, compiler-rt, libssp, …). If all went well, it should have created a folder in build/tests with a bunch of NROs you can load. Those are your first homebrews !

To start them, connect your switch to pegaswitch, and type runnro path/to/nro.nro in the pegaswitch console. If it doesn’t crash your switch, it should run !

You should probably set the LIBTRANSISTOR_HOME environment variable to your libtransistor/dist folder, as this is how make will find where libtransistor is. You can do that by writing export LIBTRANSISTOR_HOME=/path/to/libtransistor/dist in your shell’s RC file (~/.bashrc for instance).

Where to go from here:

Optionaly set up Pegaswitch. With this, you have a fully working development environment. You can compile and run NROs and you should also be able to build and run

RetroArch and Snes9x!

But most importantly, you can help us build awesome stuff for the Switch. If you are willing to give us a helping hand, don’t hesitate to join our Discord.

Last Updated: 2018/05/17