The base configuration for which XTide 2 was written was a 166 MHz Pentium PC with 32 MiB of RAM (circa 1997). XTide version 2.9 was successfully tested on the same PC in 2007, although by that time the RAM had been expanded to 96 MiB. Comparable non-PC hardware (e.g., Sun Sparcstation) also works.
XTide uses less than 10 MB of memory for a typical interactive session.
XTide is Unix software. It is intended to compile and run correctly on any reasonably modern version of Unix. However, I no longer have direct access to any flavor of Unix other than Linux, so I can only make portability fixes if and when issues are reported.
In order for tide predictions to have the correct Daylight Savings Time (Summer Time) adjustments, your platform must provide a sufficiently up-to-date version of the tz database. This has recently become an issue again since the U.S. changed its Daylight Savings Time rules for 2007. If your time zone database is obsolete, you may be able to upgrade it using the latest version from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ or by installing an operating system patch.
Some non-Unix platforms have limited support:
XTide is intended to compile under any reasonably modern C++ compiler that supports the Standard Template Library. However, I no longer have direct access to any compiler other than GCC, so I can only make portability fixes if and when issues are reported.
For GCC, "reasonably modern" means version 3.4 or newer.
You need bzip2, 7-Zip or some other archiver that supports the bzip2 format to uncompress the files. A list of libraries on which XTide is dependent is provided in the next section.