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Compiling Bochs on a Win32 platform

You can compile bochs on your Win32 machine!

Coding of the GUI module and the original port were done by David Ross.

Compiling Bochs on your Win32 system with MS Visual C++

This has only been tested with MS Visual C++ 6.0.

The normal build process on a unix system is to run configure to build all the makefiles and config.h, and then run make to compile Bochs. Configure takes a large number of command line arguments, for example to disable floating point or to enable sound blaster emulation. Configure works beautifully on unix systems to help make the code portable, however it cannot run on Windows. (Maybe, if you have cygwin.) Therefore, you need to either 1) run configure on a unix box and copy the makefiles and config.h, or 2) download the makefiles which are distributed in a separate ZIP file.

If you want to run configure yourself, consider using the shell script ".conf.win32-vcpp" since it is used to make binary releases. Look at it to make sure the options make sense for you. You can always run configure by hand too, but be sure to include the option --with-win32-vcpp so that it creates makefiles for win32. Copy config.h, Makefile, and the Makefiles in all subdirectories over to the windows box into the same directory as the Bochs source.

If you download the makefiles in a ZIP, just extract them into the same directory as the Bochs source. The config.h and top level Makefile should end up in the same directory as bochs.h.

Once the makefiles are installed, building Bochs is easy. Start up an MSDOS window, run the .BAT file that sets up the environment variables (C:\vc98\bin\vcvars32.bat on my system), and then run NMAKE in the Bochs source directory. You will get lots of compile warnings, but hopefully no fatal errors! At the end, you should see Bochs.exe in the source directory.