Building the Go system

This page is for the standalone Go games system. If you want to use the current MicroPython SDK and web editor, follow the MicroPython building guide instead.

Wasm (golang system on web)

You’ll need to compile the binary for wasm using tinygo. I’m on a mac, so keep in mind that all these commands are macos specific and may be different for you. For me, tinygo is installed through Homebrew.

Run these commands from the /software directory:

GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm tinygo build -o ./web/main.wasm -target wasm -tags=wasm ./cmd/wasm
cp "$(tinygo env TINYGOROOT)/targets/wasm_exec.js" ./web/

It can be quicker to use the typical Go WASM handler for builds, since the tinygo toolchain can take quite a while, even on a decent computer. In this case, the js file is different, so the commands are:

cp "$(go env GOROOT)/lib/wasm/wasm_exec.js" ./web/
GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o ./web/main.wasm ./cmd/wasm

Then, regardless of which you use, you need to actually serve this directory. For debugging, I do this through cd’ing into it and then running python3 -m http.server, which works well enough for me.

If you’re building the version used by the Astro frontend, run these commands from /software:

cp "$(go env GOROOT)/lib/wasm/wasm_exec.js" ../docs/public/
GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o ../docs/public/main.wasm ./cmd/wasm

Building (golang system on device)

To compile the standalone Go games firmware for the version one RP2040 device, you’ll need tinygo installed on your computer. Then, cd into the /software folder and run this command:

tinygo build -target=pico -o ./out/firmware.uf2 ./cmd/device

This will create a .uf2 build artifact in the /software/out directory. Alternatively, I have chosen not to include this in my .gitignore, so you can find a prebuilt file in this repository at that location, although i make no guarantees about it being up to date.