FPP Source Code                                  11 July 2006

FPP is software to program various PICmicro devices.  See
http://www.man.ac.uk/~mbhstdj for some background information.
FPP started as a small MS-DOS program called PP in 1994 and
since then various bits and pieces have been grafted on,
including a Windows GUI, to produce the ugly code you have
here.  If you get a headache trying to make sense of it all,
please forgive me.  There are quite a few undocumented features
(not just bugs :-), as there is no documentation worthy of
the name.  Nevertheless, many people have managed to use FPP
successfully and to those users who have found FPP useful, but
wished they could make it do even more, I hope you'll find the
source code useful too.  

Depending on how it is compiled FPP can be a normal Windows
program, a Windows console application or even a humble MS-DOS
program.  The Windows version can be run as if it were a
console application by invoking it as "fpp -w0" so there
are really four different configurations all with slightly
different ways of interacting with the user.  I am not happy
with the way this works and meant to fix it before releasing
the source code but that hasn't happened.  Another nuisance is
that FPP is only really at home with versions of Windows that
allow user programs access to I/O ports (i.e. not Windows XP
for example), although with the aid of a third party driver it
can be made to work with XP too. 

FPP can be built using a variety of environments including LCC,
MinGW (GCC), Visual C++ and C++ Builder.  Makefiles are provided
for producing the Windows version using LCC (makefile) and GCC
(gcc.mak) and for producing the DOS version using a Borland
compiler (dos.mak).

The following instructions describe how to build FPP from scratch
using LCC-WIN32:

1. Download the compiler from http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

2. Install it under C:\lcc (the default installation folder)

3. Double-click makefpp.bat (found in the same folder as this file)


David Tait



 
