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