There are many ways to do this, but for me none of them worked as most of the time I simply ended up with an app bundle that crashes on start.
I’ve successfully built the latest Dolphin with these steps.
First, make sure that you have Xcode installed (free download from the AppStore) and have Xcode command line tools installed:
xcode-select --install
Make sure to issue the following command, otherwise ibtool will likely fail during build:
sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
Now we need to install Homebrew – click here to visit the official site and follow the steps to install it.
Once homebrew is installed, we need to install CMake:
brew install cmake
Next, we need to download the Qt library – visit the official website, choose Open Source and download the online installer (or click here).
Mount the .dmg and double click on the installer
When asked, first press ‘Deselect all’ from the list, then click on the currently available highest version (as of writing, it is 5.12.1) and select macos, then click next and begin installing.
Alternatively, you can install it via brew, but that somehow didn’t work for me. For anyone going that route, make sure to invoke cmake with the following additional flag, like so:
-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt5)
After Qt is installed we need to download Ninja to build Dolphin – we’ll be using brew to do that, like so:
brew install ninja
Finally, let’s follow the official Dolphin instructions. First, let’s checkout the latest Dolphin code to our home directory:
git clone https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin ~/dolphin-emu
cd ~/dolphin-emu
Next, we prepare the build directory:
mkdir -p build
cd build
Now we preconfigure the build process with cmake and use Ninja to build Dolphin. Please note that I’m using version 5.12.1 of Qt and yours may very well be different, be sure to issue the following command accordingly! Double-check your installed Qt version by navigating to the Qt install folder (by default it should be within your Home dir, ~/Qt/)
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=~/Qt/5.12.1/clang_64/ -G Ninja -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Xclang -fcolor-diagnostics"
Once that finishes the final step is to build Dolphin with Ninja, simply issue:
ninja
When that finishes you should find a complete Dolphin bundle within the Binaries folder (~/dolphin-emu/build/Binaries)
Updating the build should be easy, according to the official build instructions.