Compiling VICE on Win32 with Mingw32
====================================

To build VICE on Windows95/98/NT with the free GNU compiler, you have to set up
your environment right.  To make use of the VICE configure script which
generates the required Makefiles, it is necessary to install Cygwin32, which
can be obtained from the following URL: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/

In this distribution there are all the valuable tool which are needed to build
VICE.  The Cygwin32 package comes with it's own compilers, but I don't
recommend to build VICE with them, because the generated executables are bound
to the Cygwin.dll, which tries to emulate a POSIX conform layer.  Good if you
have to port some UNIX code to Windows, but not necessary to compile VICE -
VICE is already configured to build a native Win32 application when used with
Mingw32.

To make use of this feature, you need the Mingw32 distribution:
http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/gcc.html
This is a set of the GNU compilers, and header-files, which produce native
Win32 executables.  These executables are linked against the Microsoft Windows
.dll's, which can be found on any Windows system.

After installing Mingw32 it is impotant, that the Mingw32 binaries (compiler,
linker, utilities, ...) are found *before* those of Cygwin32.  This can be
achieved by setting the PATH environment variable in such a way, that the
mingw32/bin/ directory is located before the Cygnus bin/ directory.

The last thing needed for a successful VICE compilation is DirectX for Mingw32.
Because VICE makes use of DirectX and Mingw32 doesn't come with DirectX
included, you have to download and install it yourself.  It can be found for
example at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~peterhawkins/directx.html

I recommend extracting only the required headerfiles and libraries out of the
.zip archive to prevent the replacement of already existing ones in Mingw32.
To do so start the compilation of VICE and add the required headerfile /
library after the build process stopped.  An error message will be prompted
which complains about the missing file.

When all this is set up correctly, you can change-dir into the VICE directory
and type './configure'.  After configure has finished, you can initiate the
build process by simply typing 'make'.  This should hopefully be enough to
produce all of the VICE emulators on your Windows system.


Questions related to the described set-up of the Cygnus/Mingw32/DirectX
environment can be sent to 'gritsch@iue.tuwien.ac.at'

Have fun!
