Accelerator and Beam Physics Group, AB Department

MAD-X for Windows

This page was moved to a new URL on 05-Apr-04.

MAD Home page         All versions of MAD for Windows

Installing

This page gives access to the latest versions of MAD-X for Windows.

At present a few different versions of the executable file are available.   They should run on all 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows95 through to Windows XP) and have been tested on some of them.   

• Version 3.04.46 compiled with Lahey Fortran and Microsoft Visual C++ (recommended)
  These versions should be equivalent to the current Linux release provided it has not changed since 24 September 2008.
  Download the executable (2.5 MB) for the standard version.
  Download the executable (6.5 MB) for the version including PTC.
  Download the executable (0.6 MB) for the "parser-only" version.
  Archive of earlier versions. (N.B. This online archive was thinned out on 15 October 2007.)
   
• Version 1.12, compiled 13/6/2003 with Compaq Visual Fortran and Microsoft Visual C++ (not generally recommended)
  This is an earlier version, created with a different compiler and is presently far behind the current Linux release.  Since it requires much more effort to adapt the source code for this combination of compilers, this version is not being updated for now.
  Download executable. (1.9  MB) and install it in a convenient place.

Possible locations for the executables (on a typical Windows PC) are:

C:\Program Files\mad\madx\  (recommended if you have more than one version of MAD).

C:\Program Files\madx\          (no longer recommended, you may need to change the .bat and .kex files accordingly). 

You may wish to place shortcuts to the MAD programs in your Start Menu or other convenient locations.  You may also like to customise the properties of the terminal windows that are opened by these shortcuts, e.g., 

1. Right-click the shortcut to choose a start-up folder.
2. When the MAD session has started, click the Window menu (top-left corner), adjust the properties to increase height, choose colours, etc.

(Kedit users can download the madx macro and update macro (put them both in KEDIT's USER folder) and batch file (put it in the C:\Program Files\madX folder). that will allow you to run MAD-X inside Kedit, with immediate access to the input and output. Other ways to run MAD-X are given below.)   

At present there are no registry entries or system DLLs for this program (so this simple installation recipe is the whole story).  Further setup can be done as explained for MAD8.  but there is no need for a batch file.

Reporting problems

Bug reports can be made using the form on the MAD home page.  There is also a mailing list for MAD-X there.

We are particularly interested in any differences you may find with the Linux version.

Running MAD-X on Windows

There are numerous possibilities according to taste ... 

If you add the MAD-X folder to your PATH environment variable, you can run the program from the Windows command line with "re-direction" commands like

madX < input.mad > output.mou 

(if you don't want to set your path, you can just drag the program's icon into a command prompt window, similarly for the filenames; files will be found in the current working folder). 

Alternatively, you can  double-click a shortcut icon to the program, etc.  

MAD's "system" command works with Windows command lines, e.g., 

system,"dir";
system,"notepad twiss.tfs"; 

Remember that files containing Unix system commands (some LHC examples ...) may not work as expected.  

Here is a screen dump of a small terminal session.  Note that I did not type the long file path, only 

call,file=  dragged the file icon from the Windows desktop ;

The input file contained a system command that opened the Notepad editor to inspect the output file.

File associations for the standard MAD file extensions .mad, .seq, .str can be set up exactly as explained for MAD8.

Known Problems

• At present we do not know of any problems specific to these versions (i.e. differences from the Linux version).  However it is never possible to do enough testing.  Please report your experience.

• The X11 plotting does not work (since it was made for Unix) in any Windows version.  In versions before 2.00 the Postscript file generation has not been separated from it so it does not work either.  It should be possible to generate plots as Postscript files (.ps or .eps) in Windows versions from 2.00 onwards.

Information for other MAD-X developers

The build log file for the version compiled with Compaq Visual Fortran may be of interest.  It contains warnings that may indicate problems for all versions.  Some of these have now been cleared up.

Personal notes on the the things I had to do to get the Linux MAD-X to work on Windows with Compaq Visual Fortran.

JMJ

This page has not been edited since: 24-Sep-08.