Setting up a Hack Repository
At this point, you've finished all of the preliminary steps and are now ready to start using this repository itself! As the name of the whole website this is hosted on implies, it is highly recommended that you understand how to use Git. Git is a version control software, meaning that it allows you to smoothly manage different versions and backups of your hack project. A "repository" is just a fancy name for a software project directory that uses Git.
First, you'll want to make sure that you're in your Linux home directory in your terminal by using the cd ~ command. This is your user home directory, and is the recommended folder that you should be keeping your repositories within. (You can also keep them within a sub-directory like "SM64" by running mkdir SM64 && cd SM64, if you're a fan of organization.)
Now, you'll want to run the command git clone https://github.com/HackerN64/HackerSM64.git <name of project>, of course replacing <name of project> with the name of whatever hack you want to create. This "clone" command will create a local copy of the HackerSM64 repository on your local machine. Once it's finished downloading, enter this newly-made directory with the command cd <name of project>.
Despite having all of the dependencies installed and the game code downloaded, you will still not be able to build your own ROM yet. This is because the Super Mario 64 decompilation project (and any forks of it such as this one) does not provide assets such as textures and music. Instead, it extracts these assets from a vanilla SM64 ROM that the user provides. This means that you will need to acquire this vanilla ROM yourself, through some means or another. We cannot provide or link to this ROM ourselves - Google can help you in this case. Make sure that it's the US version, which typically has the (U) label on its filename.
Once you've obtained a ROM of the vanilla US version of SM64, copy it into the root folder of the repository you made earlier, and congratulations, HackerSM64 will now be able to build!
Note: Your baseroms can also be stored in a global folder, so you can skip the previous step in future projects. This is located in ~/.local/share/HackerSM64/ (Pro Users: $XDG_DATA_HOME/HackerSM64/)
To build it, run the command make -j$(nproc) in Linux at the root of your repository. After a few seconds of a lot of text running across the screen as part of the build process, you will have just created your first ROM! You can find it at <name of project>/build/us_n64/sm64.z64, which can be run in any good N64 emulator (or even loaded onto a real N64 with a flash cart).
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