Compile StepMania on Raspberry Pi

Scripts & instructions to build StepMania from source on a Rasperry Pi running Raspian.

There is a lot more required to make StepMania actually playable on a Raspberry Pi. If all you want to do is play StepMania, check out raspbian-stepmania-arcade instead.

1. Prerequisites
2. Quick Start
3. Notes

Prerequisites

You must provide the following:

1. A supported Raspberry Pi model
   1. 3B
   2. 3B+
   3. 4B
2. An installed & working Raspbian operating system, Stretch (v9) or later.

Quick Start

1. Clone this repository
2. Run make
3. Wait a while
   1. ~2 hours for Rpi 3B
   2. ~30 minutes for Rpi 4
4. Look in /usr/local/stepmania-*
5. Done!

Note: You've just built the Stepmania binary but there's a lot more required to play it well on a Raspberry Pi. For that, check out raspbian-stepmania-arcade.

Notes

Building for Other Raspberry Pi Models

If you look at sm-arm.patch, you'll see there are two variables that really matter for building StepMania:

1. ARM_CPU
2. ARM_FPU

See this excellent gist: GCC compiler optimization for ARM-based systems for more information on compiling with GCC on Raspberry Pi.

In particular, it's got tables of the ARM_CPU and ARM_FPU values for other Raspberry Pi models. Who knows, they might work! The regular 3B was just powerful enough to run StepMania acceptably; older models may struggle to perform.

Edit your Makefile and give it a try!

Or, just run

make ARM_CPU=... ARM_FPU=...

Supporting Other Raspberry Pi Models

This repository uses the SpottyMatt/rpi-hw-info repository to decode Raspberry Pi hardware information and figure out the correct compiler flags.

If you manage to get this to compile on a new Raspberry Pi model, make sure that repository is capable of correctly-detecting the new Pi, and reports the correct CPU and FPU compile targets.

Then, update the rpi-hw-info submodule in this repo and you're done! This repo now supports compiling for the new Raspberry Pi hardware.

StepMania Source

This uses a working commit from the 5_1-new branch of StepMania as the source code. Probably the latest 5.1 release.

If you want to try building from a more recent commit, update the stepmania submodule before building and installing.