QVM Toolchain Snapshot

The classic Quake III virtual machine (QVM) builders are still wired into the src/code/Construct meta-build and expect a staging directory called code/qvmtools/. The Cons script populates that folder on demand by compiling the required utilities and copying the resulting binaries back into the game tree for later reuse.【F:src/code/Construct†L287-L308】 This snapshot captures the binaries that are staged there today and the host requirements needed to rebuild them if the cache is missing.

Bundled binaries and their sources

Deliverable	Origin	How it is produced
q3lcc	src/lcc/	Built through the platform-specific LCC makefiles (makefile on POSIX, makefile.nt via nmake on Windows) and copied into code/qvmtools/ by the Cons helper.【F:src/lcc/makefile†L1-L60】【F:src/lcc/makefile.nt†L1-L61】【F:src/code/Construct†L287-L308】
q3rcc	src/lcc/	Compiled alongside q3lcc by the same makefiles and deposited into code/qvmtools/ once build_tools('q3lcc') completes.【F:src/lcc/makefile†L17-L36】【F:src/lcc/makefile.nt†L17-L36】【F:src/code/Construct†L287-L308】
q3cpp	src/lcc/	Produced by the LCC driver build and staged together with q3lcc/q3rcc for reuse by the VM wrapper scripts.【F:src/lcc/makefile†L23-L30】【F:src/lcc/makefile.nt†L23-L30】【F:src/code/Construct†L287-L308】
q3asm	src/q3asm/	Built with the standalone GNU makefile that wraps a direct gcc compile and then copied into code/qvmtools/ by the Cons helper.【F:src/q3asm/Makefile†L1-L12】【F:src/code/Construct†L287-L308】

The VM wrappers that drive this toolchain (src/code/game/game.sh, src/code/cgame/cgame.sh) assume those binaries live on the PATH and assemble the .qvm artefacts in a vm/ subdirectory before invoking q3asm with the corresponding .q3asm linker script.【F:src/code/game/game.sh†L1-L46】【F:src/code/cgame/cgame.sh†L1-L34】【F:src/code/game/game.q3asm†L1-L15】 Windows batch equivalents (game.bat, cgame.bat) provide the same orchestration for contributors who stay on the legacy toolchain.【F:src/code/game/game.bat†L1-L53】 These scripts populate code/game/vm/ and code/cgame/vm/ with the bytecode payloads consumed by the engine and installation helpers such as installvms.bat.【F:src/code/installvms.bat†L1-L6】

Host prerequisites

Recreating the staged binaries requires the original build prerequisites for each tool:

• POSIX (Linux/macOS) – The src/lcc/makefile assumes a Unix toolchain with make, a hosted C compiler (cc/gcc), ar, and ranlib for the archive steps.【F:src/lcc/makefile†L1-L37】 The assembler lives in src/q3asm/ and builds with a single gcc invocation driven by its minimalist makefile.【F:src/q3asm/Makefile†L1-L12】
• Windows – The helper script src/lcc/buildnt.sh shells out to nmake -f makefile.nt all, which in turn hard-codes the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler (cl) and linker to emit the LCC family of executables in debug (/MDd) mode before they are copied into code/qvmtools/.【F:src/lcc/buildnt.sh†L1-L5】【F:src/lcc/makefile.nt†L1-L61】 The VM batch files expect those binaries to be reachable directly as lcc, q3asm, etc., mirroring the legacy Quake III development environment.【F:src/code/game/game.bat†L1-L53】

With these prerequisites in place, invoking the wrapper scripts will recreate the .qvm payloads exactly as the Quake III pipeline originally did, keeping bytecode builds available for regression testing while the native DLL workflow evolves.