sc68-buildkit

Prebuilt static libsc68 + a one-command recipe to build more targets.

libsc68 is the engine of sc68 — Benjamin Gerard's Atari ST / Amiga music player (Motorola 68000 CPU + YM-2149 / Paula emulation) that plays SNDH and .sc68 files. sc68 is a ~2016 autotools project whose source tree no longer builds cleanly on modern systems. This kit packages the fixes and ships the resulting libraries so you don't have to rediscover them.

Upstream: sc68 © Benjamin Gerard (Ben/OVR) — http://sc68.atari.org, source https://sourceforge.net/p/sc68 (mirror https://github.com/Zeinok/sc68), GPLv3. This repo only builds/repackages it — see Credit & license below.

When to use sc68 vs psgplay

If you just want the best Atari ST/STE SNDH playback, reach for psgplay first: it emulates the STE DMA sound (and the LMC1992 mixer), which sc68 does not, so it plays the STe / MaxYMiser tunes (with their sampled drums/bass) that sc68 renders thin. psgplay also builds cleanly on a Pi in ~1 minute (no source fixes), so it needs no prebuilt kit like this one.

sc68 keeps two niches psgplay doesn't cover, which is why this kit still exists:

• ICE-packed SNDH — psgplay requires uncompressed SNDH data and refuses packed files; libsc68 depacks ICE transparently (via the bundled unice68). If your .sndh files are ICE-packed (magic ICE!), sc68 plays them as-is.
• .sc68 files and Amiga (Paula) tunes — psgplay is Atari ST/STE only; sc68 covers .sc68 and Amiga.

In the retropie-game-music-player jukebox that consumes this kit, psgjuke (psgplay) is the primary SNDH engine and stjuke (these libs) is the fallback — it fires only for ICE-packed / .sc68 / Amiga tunes psgplay can't load.

Just grab the prebuilt libs — no build needed

prebuilt/<target>/ has ready-to-link static libraries + headers:

target	CPU / libc	good for
linux-armv7-glibc2.28	32-bit ARM, glibc 2.28	Raspberry Pi OS "Buster", Pi Zero 2 W / 3 / 4

Link them into your program:

L=prebuilt/linux-armv7-glibc2.28
cc your_player.c -I"$L/include" \
  -Wl,--start-group "$L"/lib/lib{sc68,dial68,io68,emu68,file68,unice68}.a -Wl,--end-group \
  -lao -lz -lm -lpthread -ldl -o your_player

Runtime dependency: libao (apt install libao-dev). See example/sndhtest.c for a minimal loader (opens an SNDH, renders a few seconds, reports whether there's sound).

Music to play

Grab SNDH tunes to feed it from the SNDH Archive — the full, curated collection of Atari ST YM-2149 music (~9,900 tunes, organised by composer). Download the whole set here:

https://sndh.atari.org/download.php

Every .sndh there plays with these libraries.

Build for another target

build/build.sh cross-builds inside a Debian container that matches the target's CPU and glibc, so the output runs there unchanged. Needs Docker.

cd build
./build.sh                       # default: linux/arm/v7 buster (the Pi)
./build.sh linux/arm64 bookworm  # aarch64
./build.sh linux/amd64 bookworm  # x86-64

Results land in prebuilt/<target>/. PRs adding prebuilt targets welcome.

What the build has to work around

The sc68 SVN/mirror tree won't configure or compile as-is. build.sh applies:

• tools/vcversion.sh is missing (it's SVN-generated). configure.ac runs it via esyscmd, so it's stubbed — emitting the revision with no trailing newline (a newline ends up inside AC_INIT's version string and breaks every generated configure with "missing terminating "").
• The meta-package bootstrap fails (Makefile.am: SOURCE_UNICE68 does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL), so the sub-packages are built standalone in order: as68 → unice68 → file68 → libsc68. as68 (sc68's own 68000 assembler) must be built first and be on PATH — libsc68 assembles its TOS trap emulator (trapfunc.s → trap68.h) with it.
• hexdump is required by the bootstrap → install bsdmainutils.
• EOL Debian suites (buster) → point apt at archive.debian.org.

Why this is its own project

The sc68 build was hard-won, and the resulting libsc68 is useful well beyond any single app — anything that wants to play SNDH / .sc68 on modern Linux or ARM needs it. Rather than bury the fixes and the prebuilt libs inside one consumer, this kit keeps them reusable: grab-and-go binaries plus a recipe to rebuild for other targets. That way the next person doesn't repeat the fight.

Used by:

• retropie-game-music-player — a RetroPie / EmulationStation chiptune jukebox. Its stjuke engine links these libraries to play the Atari ST SNDH archive. It's the first real consumer, and the reason this kit exists — see its docs/BUILD-stjuke.md.

Credit & license

libsc68 and everything under prebuilt/ are part of sc68, © Benjamin Gerard, licensed GPLv3 — full text in COPYING-sc68. Please keep that attribution; sc68 is his work, this kit just makes it buildable again.

The build tooling and docs in this repo (build/, example/, this README) are dedicated to the public domain (CC0). Note that anything you distribute that includes the prebuilt libraries is a derivative of sc68 and therefore GPLv3.