First and foremost, Clang 18 is the **recommended compiler** as it is used for official builds and CI. If you build with GCC, you might encounter issues — please report any you find. Additionally, if you choose to use GCC, please build shadPS4 with Clang at least once before creating an `[APP BUG]` issue or submitting a pull request.
**Note**: The `shadps4-git` AUR package is not maintained by any of the developers, and it uses the default compiler, which is often set to GCC. Use at your own discretion.
You can also specify the Game ID as an argument for which game to boot, as long as the folder containing the games is specified in config.toml (example: Bloodborne (US) is CUSA00900).
#### Option 2: Configuring with cmake-gui
`cmake-gui` should be installed by default alongside `cmake`, if not search for the package in your package manager and install it.
Open `cmake-gui` and specify the source code and build directories. If you cloned the source code to your Home directory, it would be `/home/user/shadPS4` and `/home/user/shadPS4/build`.
Click on Configure, select "Unix Makefiles", select "Specify native compilers", click Next and choose `clang` and `clang++` as the C and CXX compilers. Usually they are located in `/bin/clang` and `/bin/clang++`. Click on Finish and let it configure the project.
Now every option should be displayed in red. Change anything you want, then click on Generate to make the changes permanent, then open a terminal window and do step 2 of Option 1.
This option is pretty convoluted and should only be used if you have VSCode as your default IDE, or just prefer building and debugging projects through it. This also assumes that you're using an Arch Linux environment, as the naming for some options might differ from other distros.
[Download Visual Studio Code for your platform](https://code.visualstudio.com/download), or use [Code - OSS](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) if you'd like. Code - OSS is available on most Linux distributions' package repositories (on Arch Linux it is simply named `code`).
Once set up, go to Extensions and install "CMake Tools":
You can also install other CMake and Clang related extensions if you'd like, but this one is what enables you to configure and build CMake projects directly within VSCode.
Go to Settings, filter by `@ext:ms-vscode.cmake-tools configure` and disable this option:
When hovering over Project Status > Configure, there should be an icon titled "Configure". Click on it and let it configure the project, then do the same for Project Status > Build.
If you want to debug it, change the build type under Project Status > Configure to Debug (it should be the default) and compile it, then click on the icon in Project Status > Debug. If you simply want to launch the shadPS4 executable from within VSCode, click on the icon in Project Status > Launch.
Don't forget to change the launch target for both options to the shadPS4 executable inside shadPS4/build:
