Compiling

In order to build Perentie, you will need the following tools in your PATH:

• Meson
• Ninja
• lua and luac, version 5.4

MS-DOS executable

You will need a copy of the DJGPP cross-compiler toolchain. We recommend building one using Andrew Wu's DJGPP build scripts. Sadly the original DOS-native DJGPP is not supported; it's utterly glacial, and not compatible with the build system.

source /path/to/djgpp/setenv
meson setup --cross-file=i586-pc-msdosdjgpp.ini build_dos
cd build_dos
ninja 

This will produce the single DOS executable perentie.exe, which can be renamed and shipped with your game.

SDL executable

You will also need:

• A POSIX-compatible C compiler toolchain, such as GCC or Clang
• SDL3

meson setup build_sdl
cd build_sdl
ninja

This will produce the single executable perentie, which can be renamed and shipped with your game.

For an improved debugging experience, you will want to turn off optimisation and turn on AddressSanitiser.

meson setup -Doptimization=0 -Db_sanitize=address build_sdl

WebAssembly

You will also need:

• Emscripten 4.0.4 or later

meson setup --cross-file=wasm32-emscripten.ini build_wasm
cd build_wasm
ninja

You will need to package your game contents into a prefetch module in order for Perentie to be able to start.

/usr/lib/emscripten/tools/file_packager game.data --js-output=game.js --preload ../example

To test the WebAssembly version locally, the following command will start a Python webserver with the correct COOP/COEP headers set:

ninja webserver

Documentation

You will also need:

• LDoc - for Lua API docs
• mdBook - for the Perentie User Guide

meson setup build_sdl
cd build_sdl
ninja doc
ninja guide