This dirctory contains a set of Visual Studio 2008 build projects for the 
current simh code base.  When used (with Visual Studio Express 2008 or 
Visual Studio Express 2010) it populates a directory tree under the BIN 
directory of the Simh distribution for temporary build files and produces 
resulting executables in the BIN/NT/Win32-Debug or BIN/NT/Win32-Release 
directories (depending on whether you target a Debug or Release build).  

The Visual Studio Projects expect that a winpcap developer pack and the
Posix threads for windows package are available in a directory parallel 
to the simh directory.  

For Example, the directory structure should look like:

    .../simh/sim-master/VAX/vax_cpu.c
    .../simh/sim-master/scp.c
    .../simh/sim-master/Visual Studio Projects/simh.sln
    .../simh/sim-master/Visual Studio Projects/VAX.vcproj
    .../simh/sim-master/BIN/Nt/Win32-Release/vax.exe
    .../simh/windows-build/pthreads/pthread.h
    .../simh/windows-build/winpcap/WpdPack/Include/pcap.h
    .../simh/windows-build/libSDL/SDL2-2.0.3/include/SDL.h

The contents of the windows-build directory can be downloaded from:

    https://github.com/simh/windows-build/archive/windows-build.zip

Download and extract the contents of this zip file into the appropriate 
place in your directory structure.  You do not need to do anything else
but have this directory properly located.

Network devices are capable of using pthreads to enhance their performance.  
To realize these benefits, you must build the desire simulator with 
USE_READER_THREAD defined.  The relevant simulators which have network 
support are all of the VAX simulators and the PDP11 simulator.

Additionally, simulators which contain devices which use the asynchronous
APIs in sim_disk.c and sim_tape.c can also achieve greater performance by
leveraging pthreads to perform blocking I/O in separate threads.  Currently
the simulators which have such devices are all of the VAX simulators and 
the PDP11.  To achieve these benefits the simulators must be built with 
SIM_ASYNCH_IO defined.

The project files in this directory build these simulators with support for
both network and asynchronous I/O.

To build any of the supported simulators you should open the simh.sln file 
in this directory.

The installer for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is available from:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/8/E/E8EEB394-7F42-4963-A2D8-29559B738298/VS2008ExpressWithSP1ENUX1504728.iso

If you are using a version of Visual Studio beyond Visual Studio 2008, then 
your later version of Visual Studio will automatically convert the Visual 
Studio 2008 project files.  You should ignore any warnings produced by the 
conversion process.