Bringing Marmalade SDK-based apps to Windows 10 – a step-by-step guide

Hello Developers,

Here's some exciting news for developers who have built apps on Marmalade.

With the recent release of the Marmalade Beta SDK with Windows 10 Support, apps and games built with the Marmalade SDK can now be targeted for and deployed to Windows 10 PCs or phones.

In most cases, your app will not require significant code changes to move to Windows 10. However, the SDK is still a limited beta and changes could be required as updates are made to the supported Marmalade SDK extensions list. Current Beta release limitations are documented and can be found here.

This quick guide will describe the basic steps to follow in order to deploy Marmalade-based apps to Windows 10 PCs and phones.

Set up your development environment

In this section we prepare the development environment.

1. Windows 10 (visit this page for more info)
2. Install Visual Studio 2015 RC
3. Install Marmalade Beta SDK for Windows 10

Configure the Marmalade SDK for Windows 10 Development

Prepare the Marmalade SDK for Windows 10 development.

1. After installing the Marmalade SDK as previously specified, launch the Marmalade Hub: (this can be found here: <marmalade_sdk_path>\tools\hub\hub.exe)

2. Select the Dependency Checker

3. Make sure that Visual Studio 2015 is selected for Windows 10 C++ Development:

We are now ready to create a new Marmalade app or build and run existing Marmalade examples for the Windows 10 platform.

Go back to the HOME screen by clicking the home icon in the navigation bar:

Build and run a Marmalade app on Windows 10 devices

Now we have everything ready to enable Windows 10 development via the Marmalade SDK. We will build one of the Marmalade examples and deploy it to both a local PC and phone running Windows 10.

1. Select Marmalade C++ :

2. Go to Tutorial code and examples:

3. Let’s select the Graphics -> IwGraphicsScalabePipeline example:

4. Open selected project:

5. Switch Platform to Windows 10:

6. Select NATIVE DEBUG action:

7. After pressing the NATIVE DEBUG button, the example will be opened in Visual Studio 2015 with Native Debug Mode enabled.

Note: In the current beta release packaging and deployment to Windows 10 from the Marmalade Hub or command line is not supported.

8. As you can see, by default the ARM architecture is selected and deployment is set to Device. Make sure that your Windows Phone running Windows 10 is connected via USB and press the Run button (F5) to launch the example:

9. You should now be able to see the previously selected Marmalade example running on Windows Phone with Windows 10 OS:

10. To deploy to local PC select X86 and Local Machine:

11. Press the Run button to see your app running on the local PC:

Note: This is a cross-platform Marmalade app that can be deployed for different targets without any source code modification. No code changes were made to this example to make it run on Windows 10 Phone or PC.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, the Windows 10 development environment was prepared and one of the Marmalade examples was built and deployed to Windows 10 devices.

As you have noticed, no change to the example code (which is written in C++ and uses OpenGL ES APIs for rendering) was made. Similar efforts are required to add Windows 10 support to all existing Marmalade apps.

A next step could be to optimize your app for Windows 10 users (for instance leveraging Windows HEVC video codec support for package size optimization, add Xbox Live support for social integration, deploying to Xbox and adding Gamepad support, etc.).

Try it out and let us know your feedback!

-Ahmed