The Paper Tape Project - Using Windows ====================================== Most work at the paper tape project was performed on Unix operating systems (like Linux). With their powerful shells its quite easy to perform various operations like transforming ASCII hex code files to binary files, truncate or add null bytes, generate bit musters (e.g. as paper tape labels or for testing purposes) and read in or punch out, because you can concate simply every program with every else - following the Unix philosophy: * Write programs that do one thing and do it well. * Write programs to work together. * Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) Microsoft Windows doesn't follow this philosophy, and therefore it's not comfortable at all while working in the Paper Tape Project. On the other hand, I was requested to program a punching GUI for Microsoft Windows. Therefore I have programed a M$ Windows parallel port driver and a GTK graphical user interface. To compile these things on Windows, I use MinGW and MSYS, as well as the precompiled GTK+ libraries and header files for Windows. This documentation shall give a small overview how to setup an environment. Programing has been tested at Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Generally, the old Win 9x tree is no more supported. Setting up the Windows Environment ---------------------------------- You need to install, in order: 1. MinGW. The most simple is the Automated MinGW Installer. See http://www.mingw.org 2. MSYS, if you want. 3. The latest version of GTK+ (2.10.0 or newer) Sven Köppel, $Id$