Installation Instructions

Win XP / Win Vista / Windows 7

Install in user directory

Installing Darwinbots in the Program Files directory is not recommended. Unless you are running as an Administrator, and/or UAC is turned off, Darwinbots will run into errors when tries some file operations (ex. Auto-Saves of sims). It is instead recommended to install to a non-protected directory such as C:\Users\USERNAME\Darwinbots2

Upgrading

The Darwinbots community is quite active, and major releases are made public generally every month. Each new version contains substantial improvements. Don't cheat your Darwinbots experience! Be sure to have the latest version installed.

Upgrading Darwinbots is quite easy, as all you need is the new sysvars file and executable. New patches are listed on Downloads in chronological order, so newer releases are generally listed last for a section. Each release comes with a code archive and patch, downloadable separately.

Newer releases are, obviously, of higher numbers. Thus 2.36 comes after 2.35 but before 2.4.

After downloading the zip of the new version, unzip it to your Darwinbots folder. (typically C:\Program Files\DarwinBotsII or C:\Users\USERNAME\) Yes, you must do this manually. The developers are far too busy with real programming to figure out how to implement an autopatcher.

Final Note

New versions almost always have bugs. The first week or so after a new release is filled with the programmers releasing minor updates almost daily. These updates are noted by the suffix numbers of the version. Thus, 2.37.0 was the initial release of 2.37 2.37.4 is the 4th bug fix version released.

We know it's a pain to download a new patch almost every day. But it's only through community bug testing that the bugs can be isolated at all.

Anything with the same first 3 digits (that is, all versions of 2.XX) have the same features and differ only in minor bug fixing.

Regional settings

Darwinbots is pretty stupid and assumes that you're using the American decimal system, where numbers look like this: 123,456.789 (123 thousand...). If you don't live in America, and you're used to numbers looking like this: 123.456,789, Darwinbots will run, but there will be a few random errors in the user interface. To fix this, go to your Windows Control Panel->Regional and Language Options-> and make sure the number blank says "123,456,789.00". If it doesn't, change your region to one that does (such as English(United States)).

Windows 95 Potential Compatibility Warning

A user running Windows 95 reports that installing Darwinbots will overwrite an older version of comdlg32.dll with a newer and Windows 95 incompatible version. If you experience this problem (frequently receive the error <<Can't find comdlg32.dll>> or <<comdlg32.dll linked to missing export shell32.dll>> when you run just about any program) please report them in the forum for proper debugging.

Installing DarwinBots under Linux

Note: This information is no longer current, although it may be of some use.

DarwinBots can run under Linux using the wine Windows emulator, although the simulation speed may be slower and bugs and crashes may happen. Following these steps will usually make it work:

• Install the Wine package.
• Get the libraries MSVBVM60.dll, scrrun.dll and wininet.dll from reliable sources. If DB crashes when you try to run it, you'll probably need a few more dlls.
• Place those files at the folder /(username)/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.
• Open a terminal window and go to the system32 folder.
• Write "wine regsvr32 scrrun.dll". This will register the dll in the Wine Windows registry. If this doesn't work, try "regedit scrrun.dll".
• Now, do "winecfg", select "wininet" at Libraries and specify it to be run first as native.
• Get the DB installer, place the setup.exe file somewhere in the drive_c folder.
• Go to that folder and type wine setup.exe. This will install the old DB version and some needed files. Then you can drop the newer executables and run them with wine. If you aren't comfortable using the terminal, you can load a wine file explorer running "winefile". You can also configure how wine emulates Windows for the DB executables with "winecfg", although the Windows 2000 default setting seems to work well.

If you are on a Gnome desktop, avoid using Gedit to edit the code of your robots, as it will enter incompatible line breaks.

--MacadamiaNuts 17:17, 10 November 2007 (MST)

Installing on Ubuntu 10.04 (the easy way):

• Install the Wine package
• Get Winetricks to install vb6run
• Double click setup.exe to install the old version. Then you can drop the newer executables and run them with wine.

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