Please make these tools more Windows-friendly

[vbdasc2]

Many of these tools use fopen() with non-binary modes, and as a result they don't work correctly under Windows, for example mksimtape and rawtap.

[pkoning2]

Not too surprising. Given that you know to recognize these things, you might contribute bugfixes for them as you see them. That's more likely to work well than for non-Windows users to attempt to track them down.

[vbdasc2]

There is nothing Windows-specific in the fopen() behaviour. The C standards state that files which are to access binary datasets should be opened in binary mode (activated by inserting "b" into the mode parameter of fopen()), or incorrect results and even data corruption may occur. This rule, unfortunately, has been violated in several tools in simtools. What protects Linux (and Unix) users from these bad consequences is that according to the POSIX standard fopen() ignores the binary mode, or to be more specific, text mode behaves exactly as the binary mode.

There is one easy and maybe safe way for Windows users to use these tools... by compiling them with Cygwin. I might indeed start fixing some of the simpler tools to work correctly with mingw too, but the question is how do I do it? If I clone the repository, fix things in the clone and then make a pull request, will you approve it?

[pkoning2]

The procedure is to create a "fork" of the open-simh/simh repository under your name, make the changes you want to deliver, commit them and push them to your fork repository, then in the Github web interface for your fork use the button to open a pull request. That will post your work as a proposed changed to open-simh where it can be reviewed and then merged.

[vbdasc2]

Okay, I'll start doing this these days, program by program, when I have time to study the code. Some programs I will leave untouched, though, if they're too complex.