ZigStation 2

An experimental project for compiling zig for the PlayStation 2, using the PS2DEV toolchain and PS2SDK.

Requirements

Zig 0.14.0 (tested with 0.14.0-dev.839+a931bfada)
PS2SDK and PS2DEV environment variables with a relatively recent build of the toolchain (mips64r5900el-ps2-elf-gcc works, ee-gcc doesn't)

Tested on

compiled EE code has been tested on:
- pcsx2 2.0 (working)
- SCPH-75004 (working)
compiled IOP code has been tested on:
- SCPH-75004 (working)

Planned testing:

SCPH-70004, primarily due to the original IOP.

I don't have any other PS2 models on hand, but feel free to test the example elf file this repo compiles on your own consoles, and please report back whether it works on not!

Limitations

PS2DEV declares a custom target called mips64r5900el-ps2-elf, and this cannot be compiled by Zig's LLVM backend. Due to this, the zig target has been set to mipsel-freestanding-c, which translates the zig code to C as if it was compiling for a plain mipsel cpu without any ABI, and then the buildscript passes this generated C code to ps2dev's gcc.

The main issue with this is that any POSIX functionality in zig's standard library doesn't work (POSIX error type is void on freestanding), this includes most logging utilities, std.Thread (even though pthreads is available in PS2DEV).

build.zig - Contains an example buildscript that invokes the PS2DEV gcc compiler for compiling and linking
src/c.h - Separate C header file with the imports. The buildscript converts this to zig, and then adds it as an import. The reason for doing it like this instead of @cImport is that zls is unaware of the PS2SDK system imports, and this also reduces compile times a bit when changing zig code only (cImports don't need to be re-evaluated)
src/main.zig - An example code that can run on the ps2 once compiled. I will frequently modify this file, so it will do different things depending on which commit you're on.
shell.nix - For NixOS users. A shell with the PS2DEV and PS2SDK env vars, and an FHS with the PS2DEV dependencies. You probably have your own already if you got this far.
zls - Also for NixOS users. Launches the zls executable from PATH inside the shell.nix file's FHS.
zig - Ditto, runs zig in the same FHS as the zls one.

Future goals

Encapsulate the mess in build.zig to a standalone module which can be imported via build.zig.zon
Create a patchset for the zig standard library for the PS2DEV ABI
(maybe?) upstream a ps2dev OS target/abi to zig. Object file generation still unsupported (it's in LLVM), only C backend is targeted for now.
Abstraction layers to hide the raw C code mess
DMA demo that works with the vector units to make a spinny cube using said abstraction layer

License

Plain old LGPL3.0 for now, see COPYING and COPYING.LESSER.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute any improvements, cleanups, abstraction layers, etc. (really just whatever you want, this project is still very new and I don't really have a precise goal aside from "zig on PS2")

Community

At the moment i'm only really active about ps2 zig programming in the PS2 Scene discord server's #other-language-dev channel. You can hop in there to see my insane ramblings i guess.

FalsePattern/ZigStation2