Carefully following procedures in [[windows_toolchain_core]] I was successful up to the message:
“Please answer the following in the form of c:/foo/bar. Where is your MinGW installation? c:/MinGW”
The only file in c:/MinGW/bin/ is mingw32-make.exe, and no such file as gcc.exe exists there.
Also, according to [[windows_toolchain_core]], “make upgrade” it says;
“Unfortunately there is currently no installer for the required version of make (v3.81). It is downloaded in the MinGW setup above, but we must copy it to the correct location.”
Click ‘Start… Run’.
Paste in the following command:
copy c:\MinGW\bin\mingw32-make.exe c:\msys\1.0\bin\make.exe /y
Click ‘OK’.
But this command in Windows is invalid, (message returned is: “Windows cannot find copy”) and copying across by hand only results in the complaint that the file ‘make.exe’ already exists (which is very true.
Below is a copy of the Console window during the procedure:
C:\msys\1.0\postinstall>PATH ..\bin;C:\Perl\site\bin;C:\Perl\bin;C:\WINDOWS\syst
em32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI C
ontrol Panel;C:\Program Files\Microchip\MPLAB C32 Suite\bin;C:\Program Files\Mic
rochip\MPLAB IDE\VDI;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\Tools\WinNT
;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Bin;C:\Program Files\Mi
crosoft Visual Studio\Common\Tools;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98
\bin;C:\Program Files\SDCC\bin
C:\msys\1.0\postinstall>..\bin\sh.exe pi.sh
This is a post install process that will try to normalize between
your MinGW install if any as well as your previous MSYS installs
if any. I don’t have any traps as aborts will not hurt anything.
Do you wish to continue with the post install? [yn] y
Do you have MinGW installed? [yn] y
Please answer the following in the form of c:/foo/bar.
Where is your MinGW installation? c:/MinGW
I could not find c:/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe. You must have given an invalid
path to your MinGW environment. I am reversing to no MinGW
installation. If you do have MinGW installed then you can manually
bind the mount point /mingw to C:/mingw (replace C: with the
drive of your choice) by creating an /etc/fstab file with a line
that has a value similar to:
C:/mingw /mingw
Press ENTER to continue
Normalizing your MSYS environment.
You have script /bin/awk
You have script /bin/cmd
You have script /bin/echo
You have script /bin/egrep
You have script /bin/ex
You have script /bin/fgrep
You have script /bin/printf
You have script /bin/pwd
You have script /bin/rvi
You have script /bin/rview
You have script /bin/rvim
You have script /bin/vi
You have script /bin/view
MinGW-1.1 has a version of make.exe within it’s bin/ directory.
Please be sure to rename this file to mingw32-make.exe once youve
echo installed MinGW-1.1 because it\s very deficient in function.
Press ENTER to continue.
C:\msys\1.0\postinstall>pause
Press any key to continue . . .
=================================================================
I gave up at this point, thinking that I must be too dense to grasp something fundamental, which I cannot see. 
If I start again, do I need to uninstall everything? ???
Do the letters Ming perhaps have some deep esoteric C++ meaning?
It seems to me that there’s a great deal of effort just to change a couple of lines of code, and I wonder if it cannot be more readily achieved using Assembler?
cheers all.