PiDP-8/I Software

Changes To OS Compatibility
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Changes to "OS Compatibility" between 2024-03-18 15:52:39 and 2026-03-14 21:27:33

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This project's current primary maintainers use macOS at home, so the PiDP-8/I software is frequently built and tested on macOS while we are working on features that do not require the PiDP-8/I front panel hardware.

Why? Because it builds many times faster than on a Pi!

Stock macOS doesn't have everything you need to make it work. We recommend installing [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/), then using that to install the third-party dependencies that the PiDP-8/I software needs.

## macOS-Specific Requirements

**GNU Coreutils:** macOS ships with BSD versions of common Unix utilities. This project requires GNU coreutils for full compatibility (e.g., `realpath`, `readlink`).

**Python Compatibility:** This project requires setuptools < 70 because it uses `pkg_resources` for version checking. Modern setuptools (70+) removed `pkg_resources` in favor of `importlib.metadata`. We maintain compatibility with Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (Python 3.9) as our baseline platform.

We use the `--break-system-packages --user` flags with pip3 when python is installed with homebrew. It safely installs Python packages to your user directory without modifying Homebrew's Python installation.

# FreeBSD

Because of our regular testing on macOS, the software works well on x86 FreeBSD.

On FreeBSD 12, you need the following prereqs: