ASCEND IV WinNT/95 Installation

Learning the modeling tools and reading more about ASCEND.	Decide that you want to install ASCEND, then register. Howtos for mathematical modeling in ASCEND are available from ascend/pdfhelp.htm. Bibliography and online publications relating to ASCEND and ASCEND applications are available from ascend_documentation.htm. Contact information on ASCEND including free bug report/technical support information is available from the ASCEND Project at CMU. All information is available in Adobe PDF format. Some information is available in alternate formats. GNU license freedom applies. Please do note that ASCEND is distributed under a GNU license which basically says that you can have the software for free. If you wish to distribute it to others, you must tell them it is available for free from us and how to get it. If you alter the distribution in any way, you must clearly mark that it is different and again tell anyone to whom you distribute your version that our version is available for free. Your changes come under our license IF they are entangled with ours, and you must give us the changed code. Only if you do not change our code in any way will yours escape becoming subject to the GNU license.We did this to encourage others to join us in making the system better and free. Note, the UNIX version contains the source code for ASCEND. You can load this version even if you do not intend to install it on a UNIX workstation.
CMU modeling libraries:	A variety of libraries are included in the ascend4\models\ directory. See ascend4\models\README.txt or README.html for details. Additional contributed models may be available from the ASCEND web sites above.
To install this software for Windows 95 or Windows NT 4:	Download and unzip a409.zip (3.9M). If your unzip program has an option that turns folder information off and on, turn it ON. ASCEND will not work without being arranged in its folders. You will now have directory \ascend4-0.9.0. Find ascopt4.exe in new folder ascend4-0.9.0\ascend4\bin\, then double-click to start ascend. or right click to create a shortcut and move the shortcut to your desktop or menu folder. Do NOT move the ascopt4.exe. It will not work except from the bin directory.
To download across a slow or bad connection.	ASCEND is available in floppy disk sized pieces for those who are unable to download it successfully in one large file. If your browser will not let you access our web file server, try anonymous ftp instead from www.ndim.edrc.cmu.edu:/usr1/ftp/ascend/
To install this software for NT 3.x, NT 5, Windows 3.1.1:	ASCEND may work for WinNT 3.x or WinNT5 depending on how reliable Microsoft is in maintaining backward compatibility. Let us know if it works for you. ASCEND may work for Win311 if you have installed Win32s. Verify that you have win32s and then follow the instruction for installing under Win95 or WinNT4. We have not tested this theory as we have no obsolete Windoze 3.1.1 machine.
To install this software for Windows98:	Yawn. We do not have access to Microsoft's latest alleged web browser. If you do, try installing ASCEND by following the instructions for WNT4/W95. If you succeed and ASCEND works for you, please let us know.
Tcl/Tk Notes:	ASCEND relies on the portable GUI system from www.scriptics.com Tcl/Tk 8.0p2. The ASCEND IV zip file is entirely self-contained. You do not need to install Tk separately. ASCEND will not interfere with any other Tcl/Tk version you may have installed.
To install the debugger version of ASCEND under Windows:	ASCEND IV is compiled with Developer's Studio, Visual C++ 5.0, and Digital Fortran. The unoptimized executable file with debugger symbols is available. Install the normal version of ASCEND IV. Download and unzip a4debug.zip (792k). Move the ascend4.exe that is extracted to ascend4-0.9.0/ascend4/bin. It now is next to ascopt4.exe. Run ascend4.exe just as you would ascopt.exe.
Building ascend4 from the source distribution:	Building ascend under Linux or other UNIX is trivial assuming you have matched ANSI compliant C and F77 compilers available. The configure and make programs take care of nearly everything automagically. Under wintel, life is not so simple. ASCEND IV is compiled with Developer's Studio from a single set of sources that works under all known ANSI C/C++ compilers for UNIX/X11R6 or Windows. It is in principle portable to Macintosh, though this has not been done. Because the wintel development environment is such a piece of standards non-compliant garbage, makefiles are not yet available. The configuration (.dsw/.dsp) or .mak files for Windows Developer Studio are available on request. Contact Ben Allan.