🍎 macOS Setup

If you’ve landed on this page, it means you’re using macOS 🖥️ to build legendary Nintendo 64 games with GoSprite64. Good news: macOS is great for this. Even better news? You probably don’t need to do much here.

👉 All of the setup is fully 100% automated via mage Setup. But if you want to know what's happening under the hood, read on.

🧱 Prerequisites

Here’s what you’ll need before you can start hacking around:

Brew

First, make sure you install Apple's developer resources, that is Xcode, including the Command Line tools.

xcode-select --install
xcode-select -p # to verify they are installed

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

You will also need to install several other packages for which we'll include instructions assuming you have installed the Homebrew package manager on your system:

First install the package manager, that is Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Output:

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

✅ Install Go

If you don’t already have Go installed:

brew install go

Make sure you can use it by giving it as try, run: go version.

✅ Install Mage

go install github.com/magefile/mage@latest

Make sure you can use it which mage.

✅ Install direnv

brew install direnv

After that, hook direnv into your shell. Edit either ~/.zshrcor ~/.bashrc and add one of the following lines:

eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"   # for ZSH
eval "$(direnv hook bash)"  # for bash

Then run either source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc respectively.

🧙‍♂️ Run the Setup

Now clone the repo and run:

git clone https://github.com/drpaneas/gosprite64
cd gosprite64
mage Setup

What happens now:

🧬 A custom Go toolchain for MIPS gets cloned and compiled
🛠 A GOPATH and GOROOT get set up at ~/toolchains/nintendo64/gopath and ~/toolchains/nintendo64/go respectively.
🧪 emgo tool gets installed
⚙ An .envrc file is created at ~/toolchains/nintendo64 so that direnv can auto-activate your dev environment

You can verify all those by going to cd ~/toolchains/nintendo64/ and witness your Go env setup changing.

Outside of the toolchain's directory:

$ cd; go env GOROOT

# Output:
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/go/1.23.3/libexec # my system uses Go 1.23

$ cd; emgo

# Output:
zsh: command not found: emgo # expected, not from my std GOBIN

Inside of the toolchain's directory:

cd ~/toolchains/nintendo64

# Output:
direnv: loading ~/toolchains/nintendo64/.envrc
direnv: export +GOBIN +GOROOT ~GOPATH ~PATH 


go env GOROOT

# Output
/Users/pgeorgia/toolchains/nintendo64/go

emgo

# Output
Go is a tool for managing Go source code.

GoSprite64 Documentation