Hi all. I thought I might share some hints on making HDirect work with GHC 4.08.2. Installing and checking GHC: - Get the installer from the GHC downloads page, do the installation per the instructions there, including Cygwin etc. - Remove the digit "1" from the bottom of lib/imports/win32/Win32.hi - Remove old .hi files from any program source directories you may have. - To test, try compiling the Windows hello.lhs example using the command line "ghc hello.lhs -o hello.exe -package win32" and run hello.exe. - If you get linker errors about "import____timezone_dll" from time.o, you need to add the line: push(@SysLibrary, '-lcrtdll') if ($TargetPlatform =~ /-(mingw32|cygwin32)$/); below the line: push(@SysLibrary, '-lwsock32') if ($TargetPlatform =~ /-(mingw32|cygwin32)$/); in your "bin/ghc" driver script. This is because the distribution is built with an old version of Cygwin GCC which links against crtdll.dll rather than msvcrt.dll when -mno-cygwin is set on the command line (GHC uses mingw32). By doing this, spare symbols are resolved after linkage with msvcrt.dll. DO NOT SUBSTITUTE -lmsvcrt with -lcrtdll. If you substitute, you will get errors about running out of resources on fileOpen at run time. - You may also need to update your GCC Mingw32 libraries and headers from the Sourceforge Mingw32 downloads page if you have unexplained crashes. Building HDIrect 0.17 - Uninstall previous versions of HDirect including "lib/imports/com" and associated libraries, which don't work very well with GHC 4.08.2. - Get the source from the HDirect web site and untar it somewhere. - You may need to edit "lib/WideStringSrc.c" if you use the latest Cygwin distribution to remove a clashing definition and declaration of wcslen(). - Build per the instructions in the INSTALL file. - This gives you a bare bones ihc.exe which cannot handle type libraries. - Install the freshly built lib/*.hi files in a new ghc "lib/imports/com" directory and also the libraries (libHScom.a, libhdirect.a) into ghc's "lib" directory. - Do "make clean", deleting "src/ihc.exe" by hand. - Set SUPPORT_TYPELIBS=YES in "src/Makefile" - "make boot", "make", then "make lib" as before. - You now have version 0.17 of HDirect for Windows. Question Time: Why does ihc ignore binary interfaces in type libraries such as dx7vb.dll? Cheers Mike Thomas