Getting Picobat

Do you want to give Picobat a try ? This page is definitely for you. Please follow the instructions to get Picobat working on your favourite operating system (Windows, Linux, or even BSD …).

Windows

The lazy men’s method

The easiest and fastest way to get Picobat to run on your computer is definitely downloading the latest developement builds. This builds is always on the bleeding edge, so you always get the newest features.

Download the .zip file and extract it wherever you want. Inside the extracted folder, you can start Picobat by launching pbat.exe. There is no installation script yet.

The developements builds are always standalone so that you can put them wherever you want, such as on an usb stick.

The tough guys’ method

If you are a really tough guy, and you want to customise your Picobat a little more, you may want to build you own version of Picobat. However, this is not quite as straightforward as the previous option, especially on Windows.

Before even trying to do so, you must have a couple of programs installed on your computer (at least MinGW, a unix-like shell with standard tools, git and gmake). Once you have done so you can fetch the latest stable release using:

$ git clone https://github.com/darkbatcher/picobat.git
$ cd dos9-code

You can continue using the latest stable version in the master branch. Or if you’re not afraid of stumbling upon marvellous and terrifying, but yet not that frequent, bugs you can switch to latest development version using the dev branch:

$ git checkout dev

Once you have the source, you can start preparing the build using our build configuration target:

$ make config

This script prepares the make suite before compiling Picobat, beware this command may take a little while to complete as Windows is quite slow. Note that if some errors occurs, you may need to run it twice, sadly.

Now the build as been successfully prepared, you have basically two options:

$ make use-option
$ LDFLAGS='-static' make all bin

If everything went OK, your freshly compiled binaries should be in bin/. From there, you can use picobat very easilly, as stated in The lazy man’s method.

Note that these steps are only valid for newer versions of Picobat. If you build an older version (which is somehow highly unlikely), please refer to the BUILD.readme of the Picobat package.

GNU/Linux and *Nix

Precompiled binary

One of the obvious problem with Linux based OSes is the enormous numbers of different flavours. As there is a lot of package manager we cannot provide packages for all distributions, yet the preferred method is building the source on your machine.

Of course we do not provide any package for less widespread operating systems such as BSD-based operating systems or android. If you want to have theses working on your machine, you definitely need to compile it.

Building Picobat

Picobat is quite easy to compile under *Nix as required tools are usually available easily. Once you have them installed, build it as described above in the windows section.

Note that an installation target might be provided using:

$ make install