We welcome contributions! After all, this project started as a port of another. If you want to contribute, here's some information you might find useful.
For minor fixes (e.g., documentation improvements), feel free to submit a PR directly. If you would like to fix a bug or implement a new feature, please open an issue first, and mention the issue in your PR.
Once you make a PR, your code will be tested and built into a JAR automatically. You can download and test the generated artifact in the Actions tab. For more information, see Build.
We recommend using IntelliJ IDEA to work on this project. You should be able to work on any OS. On Windows specifically, you may want to consider IntellJ's WSL integration, but this is somewhat janky.
The .gitattributes specifies * text=auto eol=lf to make working in WSL2 less painful.
This is a standard Maven Java project, and the Main class is Main.java. We use JavaFX for the GUI, and we use SceneBuilder to do drap & drop GUI development. Our FXML file is at gui.fxml. Do not edit this directly; use SceneBuilder.
Dependencies are listed in pom.xml. This project has to work across all OS's on various architectures, and a lot of stuff in that file is necessary for this.
Use Google Java format to format all code (4 spaces).
Building occurs automatically via a GitHub Action (see build.yml) that uses Maven. As long as users have a compatible Java version (17+, with JavaFX bundled), this JAR should work on all OS's and architectures (x86 and ARM64). However, we have in the past encountered compatibility issues with some OS/arch combinations, so it is best to test manually (e.g., on M1 macOS) before releasing.
To build manually, go to IntelliJ and click on the Maven tab on the right. The file that we want will be at target/dependency/mips-emulator-<version>-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar. The version is specified in pom.xml.
To deploy,