PiDP-8/I Software

Windows 10 Pro and up include [Hyper-V](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/quick-start/enable-hyper-v), which runs Linux VMs quite well.

For those running Home class versions of Windows, the best free option is [Oracle's VirtualBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/).


## Cygwin

This works, and appears to work *well* besides. We didn't notice any feature regressions with respect to a Linux VM.
This works, and appears to work *well* besides in the multiple times we've tried it. The most recent test was on 2019.05.11 with 64-bit Cygwin 3.0.7 on Windows 10.

You will have to install the `libncurses-devel` and `python2-pip` packages as well as standard Unix build tools: GCC, GNU Make, etc. Having done all that, the software will build and run.

I most recently tested this on 64-bit Windows 10 running Cygwin 2.9.0.
For `bin/pidp8i` to run properly, you need to run the trunk version of our software: the systemd improvements made to it for the most recent stable release don't work under Cygwin, but we've fixed that on trunk.


## Windows Subsystem for Linux

You'd think this would work because the default WSL Linux environment is Ubuntu, and this software is known to build and run well on Ubuntu. Alas, it utterly failed the last time we tried it.
This worked well when we tried it last, which was on 2019.05.11 with a somewhat out-of-date installation of Windows 10 Pro.

The primary problem is that WSL's terminal handling was [extremely weak](https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1001) at the time, and has been so since the start. This breaks a broad swath of software — including several pieces within the PiDP-8/I software distribution — and is thus well known as a major weakness of WSL. Microsoft is aware of this and is slowly improving it, so it's possible that they've fixed all of the problems since the last time we tried it.
Older versions of WSL failed miserably due to problems in the terminal emulation, but it appears these bugs have been fixed.

If it isn't working yet, the changes announced for [WSL 2](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/) and [the Windows console](https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal) might finally clear all of that up when it's released. (Insider builds are still  a couple of months in the future at the time of this writing, and a stable release is still further in the future.)
If there are still bugs we did not find in our brief testing, the changes announced at Build 2019 for [WSL 2](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/) and [the Windows console](https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal) should clear things up, as they'll provide a considerably more comprehensive Linux environment than with early WSL versions.

Meanwhile, the above options are currently better choices.
As with Cygwin, there are portability fixes on trunk now that are not yet released.