EigenD - windows 64 bit plans

with the talk of macOS going 64 bit only… some have asked about plans for EigenD for windows to be made 64 bit.

the current status:

I have compiled and had running EigenD 64 bit on windows 10, quite a while ago…

the ‘big’ issue for windows is Windows uses a driver for the Eigenharp, which in turn requires a 32 bit library to work. I do not have the source for this to make it 64 bit - so this approach can no longer work!

HOWEVER, what i did to get it working, was to move to using libusb (like the linux versions), but this requires a number of extra steps and a few other things to be installed - which Ive not had time to get into a state it could be released (*)

(*) its one thing for me to get something running on my development machine, but a very different thing for me to work out the exact process required for an ‘end user’ get the same thing working on a clean machine,

Commander and Browser won’t work, as the 64 bit python is incompatible with some of the 32bit python libs used for the UI… EigenD/Workbench work because they do not use Python for the UI, only the backend.

so current status is windows 64 bit running in dev, and I believe its stable…
(but it is NOT in the GitHub repo, as it was a hack)
I need to find the time to ‘go to the next stage’, which Ive not had yet - of course, like many things… ‘necessity’ would make me jump on this, if Microsoft suddenly dropped 32 bit support

my current ‘to do list is’

  • determine exact requirements for install on ‘clean machine’

  • remove the hacks
    I hard coded windows to always use libusb, I need to also initially support the existing driver for 32bit, as a ‘backup plan’ - so windows will have both its current driver support and libusb.

  • spend time documenting the process

  • other EigenD stuff… it be a new release, so I’d have to update Juce,
    Juce is very much ‘time dependent’ , Juce keeps on moving on, and each time it has a nasty habit of meaning the code base needs minor tweaks for each platform (due to compiler differences)
    there are also various other changes id make for a new release.

  • test thoroughly.

all of this, as you can probably imagine, is pretty time consuming, hopefully i can take a look at this in the winter… once I get to the ‘testing stage’, I’ll post on this forum to see if some EigenD windows users want to help out.

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Thanks Mark, I missed this post. It is an exciting development.

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Sure, would gladly be testing (or whatever helps)

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nah, you didn’t i created this in response to your post…

cool…

I’m busy over next few weeks, but after that i’ll take a look…
it would be nice to get this ‘finished’ as its been on my todo list for quite a while now!

also over the winter, id like to also ‘finish’ MEC,
get it into a state where it’s a viable alternative for other Eigenharp users (including some ‘setups’) , and make that available for windows too.
(this will give us a viable fallback solution - should we get into further issues with EigenD’s toolchain etc)

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python 2 deserves its own discussion thread :slight_smile:

A post was merged into an existing topic: EigenD - python 2 plans