RealTimeBattle (RTB) for Windows

1. Purpose

The purpose of this page is to document how RealTimeBattle (RTB) can be run under Windows using Cygwin.

This page will not explain what RTB or Cygwin are - use the links for more information.

There are three ways to run RTB on Cygwin:

1. You can try the executable available from this website (step 5). It should work on a Windows NT/XP based PC, with a Cygwin version as shown in step 3.
2. You can download the files you need to compile RTB, from this website (step 6). Should work on any Windows machine.
3. You can retrieve the source code from CVS and compile the newest version of RTB available (step 7). Should work on any Windows machine.

2. Prerequisites

1. You must be somewhat familiar with Unix/Linux development
2. You must have a Windows system with at least 700 MB available space, to install Cygwin and RTB.

3. Installing Cygwin

Download the latest version from www.cygwin.com. I have successfully compiled RTB using the following version:

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 st059 1.5.18(0.132/4/2) 2005-07-02 20:30 i686 unknown unknown Cygwin

Install Cygwin wherever you want on your system, but remember where you put the setup.exe! Cygwin is installed by running setup.exe and adding packages. If you need to compile RTB, you'll need most of the devel packages as well as most of the GTK and X packages. If you want to get the source from CVS, you also need the CVS and OpenSSH packages.

Make a best guess at what you'll need, or just include everything. Don't worry about missing something - to install something later you can just re-run setup and add it. More about that later.

4. Configuring Cygwin (only needed for compilation)

After installing cygwin, go to the install dir (e.g. C:\cygwin) and open cygwin.bat for editing. You need to insert the following line before the bash command:

set CYGWIN=check_case:strict

Without this, Cygwin will be case insensitive (like Windows) which is no good when you want to compile C/C++.

Optional - only needed for CVS source retrieval
Go to your home dir (e.g. C:\cygwin\home\John) and open .bashrc for editing. For convenience, insert an alias for checking out the RTB sources (replace USERNAME):

alias cvs_co_rtb='cvs -z3 -d:ext:USERNAME@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/realtimebattle co -P RealTimeBattleNew'


5. Executable

6. Compiling RTB under Cygwin

1. Start Cygwin, e.g. using the desktop shortcut.
2. Optional To use an xterm instead of the default console: $ startx
3. Download this file to some folder. In this folder, do the following:
4. $ gunzip RealTimeBattle*.tar.gz
5. $ tar xvf RealTimeBattle*.tar
6. $ cd RealTimeBattle-<version> (e.g. 1.0.8-Ext)
7. $ ./configure (optionally with --enable-debug=yes)
8. If you did not install all Cygwin packages earlier, you will probably get errors about missing packages. No problem - just run the Cygwin setup.exe and install what's missing.
9. Rerun the configure script until no errors remain.
10. $ make
11. $ make install

7. Compiling RTB from CVS sources

1. Start Cygwin, e.g. using the desktop shortcut.
2. Optional To use an xterm instead of the default console: $ startx
3. Get the latest RTB sources: $ cvs_co_rtb (or use the actual cvs command as in step 4 above).
   This will create the RealTimeBattleNew directory.
4. $ cd RealTimeBattleNew
5. $ ./configure (optionally with --enable-debug=yes)
6. If you did not install all Cygwin packages earlier, you will probably get errors about missing packages. No problem - just run the Cygwin setup.exe and install what's missing.
7. Rerun the configure script until no errors remain.
8. $ make
9. $ make install

8. Running RTB under Cygwin

By default, RTB uses the GTK GUI. GTK uses X. So, first start X:
$ startx
If the X packages was installed correctly, this will bring up an xterm console. In this console:
$ realtimebattle &
On Windows XP, the main window should look something like this:

Enjoy!