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Installation and using z80pack under Windows XP with Cygwin:

Because Windows systems come without any language compilers, scripting languages or a POSIX compatible application interface, a decent environment needs to be installed first. Visit Cygwin, download the setup.exe program from there and let it install the current Cygwin release on your Windows system. A basic system is good enough to start with and get z80pack working, you can run setup.exe any time later, to add more programs to your system.
If you don't wish to install the X11 GUI you should get the non X11 version of rxvt. The terminal emulation that comes with Windows is not ANSI or anything compatible and best is left alone. All full screen editors, menu driven programs like Turbo Pascal, games and so on are configured here for ANSI compatible terminals. Various X11 terminal emulations are ANSI compatible and so is rxvt.

In released z80pack versions up to 1.14 the assumption is made, that the current directory is included in the $PATH environment variable. This is not the case with Cygwin by default because of security concerns. The easiest way arround the problem is to add it to the shell startup script. Open a Cygwin terminal, edit the file $HOME/.bash_profile and add the following line at the bottom of the file:

	PATH=${PATH}:.
After that restart the terminal session, so that the changed PATH is active and follow the instructions to install z80pack.

Before you run cpmsim the first time, rename or delete the program receive.exe, or the emulation probably will hang. The UNIX fork/exec and named pipe support is not working correct under Cygwin and this is a workarround for now. The next version will support usage of files without spawning another process and communicating via named pipes.

All the TCP/IP networking support is not working, because under Cygwin the SIGIO signal is not delivered on BSD sockets. All client software will hang, the asynchron TCP/IP server stuff won't accept connections, because no signal gets delivered. The next version will support TCP/IP polling for such systems, where asynchron TCP/IP isn't implemented.

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