G-Node's Neuroshare Wine-Proxy Library
======================================

Use Neuroshare Libraries for Windows on Unix(-like) Systems.

Overview
--------

The Neuroshare API is an standardize API for accessing 
neurophysiology data stored in vendor-specific binary formats
in a vendor-neutral way.
This is done with the help of so called "Neuroshare Libraries"
that are provided by the manufactures. With very few exceptions
these Libraries are only available for the Windows Platform.

The goal of this project is to make these libraries also
available on UNIX. This is done by providing an implementation
of the Neuroshare API, that is fully compliant with the library
specification; it will transparently forward all calls it 
receives to a small windows helper program running inside
wine that will in turn make this calls on the vendor provided
library needed for specific data file.
In short the G-Node Wine-Proxy Library is a smart transparent
proxy library.


Usage
-----

As the supplied library 'nsWineLibrary' is a fully compliant
neuroshare DLL that acts as a drop-in  replacement, just use
it instead of the vendor DLL that would normally be needed to
open the data file. The library itself will decide (by look-
ing at the file extension of the file to open) which vendor
DLL it needs for that very data file and load that DLL in the
background (inside the Wine environment).
Of course you need to install the specific vendor DLLs so they
can be found by 'nsWineLibrary' (see below).


Installation
------------

The compile-time requirements are:
    - glib (including gthread & gio) version  =< 2.42
    - the MinGW cross compiler

Additional runtime dependencies:
    - Wine
    - The vendor DLLs for the specific data file(s)!
      See below 'Installation of vendor DLLs'

Brief install steps:

  % ./configure			# run the `configure' script
  % make			# build phase
  % sudo make install		# installation
     or
  % make install 				
 
See the file 'INSTALL' for more detailed information.


Installation of vendor DLLs
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It is very important to note that with without the
installation of the vendor DLLs the library cannot read
any data files. Therefore the specific vendor DLL must
be downloaded and installed into one of the following
locations:
	/usr/local/lib/neuroshare
	/usr/lib/neuroshare
	~/.neuroshare

A (possibly incomplete) list of the vendor specific DLLs
can be obtained be obtained from the neuroshare website:
  http://neuroshare.sourceforge.net/DLLLinks.shtml

Some of the libraries require additional components to
function properly, e.g. the Visual C++ runtime. The
easiest way to install those is to use the 'winetricks'
helper program:
       http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks


* List of DLLs and required winetricks package:

nsAOLibrary.dll    	    'vcrun6' or 'vcrun6sp6'
nsNEVLibrary.dll	    'vcrun2003'


Reporting Bugs & Submitting Patches
-----------------------------------
Detailed debugging information can be obtained by defining
the NS_LIB_DEBUG enviroment variable:

    % export NS_LIB_DEBUG=1

The output can easily be saved to a file by piping the
standard error to a file:

    % program 2> error.log

Any bugs can and should be filed to the project's issue
tracker at github:
	https://github.com/G-Node/nswineproxy/issues