Installing on Win95/98/NT

Most of Amber (including the X-windows parts) will compile and run on Windows using the Cygwin development tools, but doing this requires some hand-tweaking and familiarity with Unix-style software development tools. Note that, although tests seem to perform correctly, this platform has not had extensive testing, and probably has unidentified limitations. The roar and interface parts of Amber have never even been tested, nor has there been any attempts to construct parallel versions of anything. But, for the brave and/or foolish, here are some notes, as of September, 1999:

1. You will need to obtain and install the Cygwin development suite from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/. Amber 6 was tested with version B20.1. Also get the X11R6.4 archive (there is a pointer at the cygwin site to this.) You will need to install sh.exe and rm.exe in /bin. Set MAKE_MODE=unix in your environment.
2. You will also need a C-shell, preferably one that works well with the cygwin environment. There are a number of pre-compiled binaries on the net; the one that works best for me was obtained from ftp://ftp.nrw.net/pub/win95/tools/tcsh.exe. (You might want to check the pointers to tcsh at the cygwin site as well.) Install this in /bin/csh.exe.
3. Start up a cygwin console window, use the Machine.g77 configuration file, and have at it!. For Win95/98, executable files need to have a .exe extension. Edit $AMBERHOME/src/sfx.h to set the required extension. This should be all that needs to be done, but consider this problem as a likely source of error if something in the build goes awry.
4. To use xleap, you will need to purchase an X-server. Configure the system to do a local display, generally by setting the DISPLAY environment variable to 127.0.0.1.
5. Be sure to use "binary" mode when moving files from Unix to Windows, and to use a text editor that preserves Unix line-ending semantics if you add or change files. Basically, this means that lines in text files must end with \\n, and not with the DOS convention of \\r\\n. Also, be aware that Windows file names are really case-insensitive, even though directory listings, etc. will preserve the case of letters in filenames.
6. Note that the executables constructed in this way require the cygwin dll to run, so that you will have to install the cygwin tools on every machine on which you wish to run Amber. Note also that there are restrictions on distributing programs that link to the cygwin libraries. (See the cygwin Web site for details.) The basic upshot is that we cannot supply pre-compiled Windows binaries created by this mechanism: you will need to compile things yourself.