Developing for PS3 – Part 1 – setup

I got an email requesting a tutorial on how to develop for PS3. Its something that other people have previously asked me for assistance with which leads me to believe that there are probably more people lurking around here that want to get into homebrew development but need a little help doing it. So I figured I would write up a series of short tutorial and post them here for public consumption.

This initial tutorial covers how to first get everything setup. Its something that’s already been covered repeatedly but regardless its still something that you obviously cant begin developing without doing.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is decide what software development kit you are going to use. I use the leaked official PS3 SDK v1.92 so that is what this tutorial will focus on. But its worth noting that PSL1GHT is definitely more appealing for ideological and legal reasons, is catching up with the official SDK in terms of functionality and is what most other developers in the PS3 homebrew community are either already using or moving towards using. There have also been more recent versions leaked then 1.92 of the official SDK which may differ slightly.

Also worth noting is that I use Windows. Things may vary depending on your OS of choice but unless I’m mistaken it should be possible to get any of the available SDKs working on almost any major platform.

You can find still active links for the 1.92 PS3 SDK at the address bellow. Its not where I got my copy (I don’t remember where I got it) and the image included in the post is of community made software that isnt actually included with the SDK which makes me think that the person who posted it didn’t actually know what they where posting. But I’m fairly certain the files linked to are correct.

http://www.katzforums.com/showpost.php?p=3433726

If anyone requests it I’ll upload the SDK elsewhere. Sony seems to have made some amount of effort to purge the SDK from the internet. There are a lot of dead links floating around to hosting services that have removed it for copyright reasons.

Step 2

At the root of your C drive create a folder named “usr”. Within that create another folder named “local” and within that one make a folder named “cell”.

Extract the contents of the rar file you just downloaded and copy it all to “C:\usr\local\cell”.

Step 3

The following two (inclusive of this one) steps can be found in PS3_SDKDoc_e.chm which should now be located at C:\usr\local\cell\doc\SDK_doc\en\chm. If you get stuck on anything then try consulting that document.

Download and install
MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe
then
MSYS-1.0.10.exe
then
msysDTK-1.0.1.exe

You might as well download CFWProphet’s PS3 PKG Tool now as it includes the three installers and your going to want it later anyways.

Step 4

Edit your environment variable (Right-click on “My Computer”, select “Properties”, open the “Advanced” tab and click the “Environment Variables” button) to include the following.

name: CELL_SDK
value: /c/usr/local/cell

name: LANG
value: C

name: DTNETM
value: hostname or IP address of the Reference Tool

name: PATH
value: c:\msys\1.0\bin;
c:\usr\local\cell\host-win32\bin;
c:\usr\local\cell\host-win32\ppu\bin;
c:\usr\local\cell\host-win32\spu\bin;
c:\usr\local\cell\host-win32\Cg\bin

Step 5

Start MSYS and enter “$ cd /c/usr/local/cell/samples/fw/testapp/” (without the quotation marks). That will change MSYS’s current working directory to that of a simple test program that is included with the 1.92 SDK. Next enter “make”. That will make it compile the test program.

Now just wait for it to finish compiling.

If all has gone well you should have a newly generated “testapp.elf” file and a “testapp.self” file located at “C:\usr\local\cell\samples\fw\testapp”.