Sunday 3 May 2009

Installing the FCEUX NES Emulator on Fedora 10

FCEUX is a Famicom/NES emulator that merges the different branches of the FCE Ultra project in to a single project. It is a great tool to have if you are a fan of classic NES games such as "Super Mario Brothers" and want to play them on your Linux machine. FCEUX has a host of features such as recording, Lua scritping etc. But as a casual gamer, you are probably only interested in getting the emulator up. For serious ROM hackers and advanced users, www.fceux.com is the place to start looking for additional info.

Installing FCEUX

FCEUX comes in two flavours. The Win32 edition and the SDL edition. We are only interested in the SDL version here. For Debian/Ubuntu users, a pre-packaged deb file already exists, but for the rest of us, it needs to be compiled from the source.

Step 1 : Install dependencies
sudo yum instal scons SDL SDL-devel zlib zlib-devel lua lua-devel zenity

Step 2 : Download and extract FCEUX
Download the source tar ball from http://fceux.com/web/htdocs/download.php and extract it.
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fceultra/fceux-2.1.0a.src.tar.bz2
tar xvf fceux-2.1.0a.src.tar.bz2

This will create 2 folders names fceu and gfceux

Step 3 : Compile and install FCEUX command line tool
cd fceu
scons
sudo scons install


Step 4 : Install GFCEUX GUI
cd ../gfceux
sudo python setup.py


Step 5 : Run the emulator
gfceux

You will need to download NES ROMS to start playing. This part is left as an exercise to the reader ;)