z88dk forums

I wanted to share a positive experience with the few ones still stuck with a 32 bit environment, the MinGW project permits a straightfoward minimalistic setup.

The project is moving to OSDN.net: https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/releases/

..with your browser move into "MinGW Installation/MinGW Get Version ..." and get "mingw-get-0.6.3-mingw32-pre-....zip"

Unzip the folder contents in a new folder, e.g. "c:\mgw", (on Windows it is strongly suggested to avoid spaces in the folders name).
Within the command prompt move into c:\mgw\bin and type:

mingw-get update
mingw-get install bash
mingw-get install mingw-developer-toolkit

(Note that, for certain esoteric reasons, some of the packages installed by mingw-developer-toolkit are MSYS packages, and install into "C:\msys\1.0" or whatever it is configured as virtual /usr directory. If you don't understand this note, don't panic.. just go ahead).


To enable this new environment, prepare a setup batch file, e.g.

set ZCCCFG=/c/z88dk/lib/config
path c:\mgw\msys\1.0\bin;c:\mgw\bin;c:\z88dk\bin;C:\windows\System32;C:\windows;
set MINGW=/c/mgw
set MINGW32=/c/mgw
bash

Another interesting use for this environment is by just adding all the files taken from an official *embeddable* python build (https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-370/), into "c:\mgw\msys\1.0\bin" to build the MAME emulator.

Most of the eventually missing elements can be installed with the same mingw-get command, just type "mingw-get list" for the description.

I forgot to include:
mingw-get install gcc

..For mame it is also necessary:
mingw-get install g++

The resulting space usage on disk, including python and g++, is about 420MB

Sorry I just noticed that the recent MAME versions require threading support, my trick would require extra hacking for MAME.

For the sake of completeness, to build MAME with a self-adjusted mingw32 tool is not easy at all, the 32 bit environment lacks is less complete and different on dealing with threads, so the MAME team still provides a pre-packaged variant of the build tools:

https://www.mamedev.org/tools/
https://www.mamedev.org/tools/previous-20170205.php
https://www.mamedev.org/tools/previous-20140905.php

They all should be valid for z88dk as well.