PDCurses Win32a — how to build on Windows 7

Question

PDCurses-Win32a quite clearly claims that its implementation of init_color() works on Windows; but when I built it as a DLL in a Visual Studio project (after nmake failed, saying it couldn't find something called "rc"), it didn't. What do I need to do to make this work -- in a manner that can also display IBM Extended ASCII (Codepage 437) characters?

Answer 1

This requires nmake, which ships with Visual Studio. There's a batchfile, vcvars32.bat, in nmake's directory (in my case, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin); run this from the PDC Win32a subdirectory, then run nmake -f vcwin32.mak UTF8=1 pdcurses.lib .

Everything else will work out of the box (if compiling as UTF-8 or UCS-2, and using the Unicode codepoints for the old CP437 characters), but this implementation is confined to the Courier font only -- better to use the SDL version of standard pdcurses.