Topic: MiLaunch - Miner Launcher (Read 1003 times)

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MiLaunch - Miner Launcher (Windows only)

Introduction
I am mining various scrypt coins with a GPU and additionally some other things (like ProtoShares or Quarkcoin) with CPU. So far I've been doing this using batch (.cmd) files for each combination of a miner and pool URL and credentials.
Having more than one configuration for the same miner (e.g. cgminer with a "silent" setup for sleep time, with a "normal" setup and with an "overclock" setup) and 20 pools for those currencies this already means maintaining 20 batch files multiplied by the 3 setups. But I even have other miners too, so it was worse than that. Also if I wanted to change, say, the --temp-target option for the "silent" setup it meant changing it in 20 batch files for all the pools.

I figured I would need a launcher where I could configure and choose the pool and the miner independently from each other. Searching online I found tools like cgwatcher, which looked very good and sophisticated but despite all the features only partially solved my problem, as pool and miner still had a too strong link between them (e.g. miners and pools not added independently but pools would be added to specific miner configurations and this had to be configured for every miner profile again).

Apart from that I simply thought it would be fun to write my own, so that's what I did. And I thought I would share it here too.
The result is really only a launcher: after launching a miner it directly exits itself and does not watch the mining process in any way. If you're searching for that, MiLaunch is not what you are looking for.

Requirements

• Windows XP or newer (32 bit or 64)
• .NET Framework 2.0 (included in Windows since Windows XP SP 2)

Features

• Manage pools and miners independently from each other and pair them only at launch time (nevertheless the tool helps you a bit by remembering what pool was used in conjunction with what miner last time)
• Launches the miner and immediately exits itself
• Choose process priority, processor/core affinity and process boost
• Miner window automatically gets a window title set with miner and pool name
• Link to website of each pool can be shown on the main window for quick access
• Tested on Windows XP 32 bit and Windows 7 64 bit (other Windows versions should work too)
• Open source (GPLv3)

Download
I didn't put it on github or sourceforge (though could be done later at any time), because it's a really small and simple tool that is not meant to become something that would need 10 active developers to collaborate on or create lots of forks. I think the most important thing is that a source code download is offered and nobody is required to trust the binary version but everyone can decide for himself about the security/convenience trade-off.
MiLaunch_v1.0.zip (binary)
MiLaunch_v1.0_Source.zip (source)

Installation and first start
With the binary simply extract the binary .zip file contents to a location of your choice. For compiling yourself also read the Compile section below.
Please note that on first execution MiLaunch will move the configuration file MiLaunch.conf file to the Application Data folder and changes are always saved to this file. You can find this folder here:

• Windows 2000, XP, and 2003: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\MiLaunch
• Windows Vista, 7, and 8: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\MiLaunch

Howto
Sorry, not yet. In the meantime try to figure it out yourself, it comes with help texts on the GUI and an example config file that already cointains some pools and miner configurations that you can fit to your needs. If you got questions, ask them here.

Compile
MiLaunch is based on .NET Framework 2.0 and written in C#. Even when there are free versions of Visual Studio available they are not fully open source. So I recommend you get the latest version of the open source IDE SharpDevelop from here. After installation you simply open the MiLaunch.sln file and build it (find the build items on the main menu). This will create the MiLaunch.exe binary in the "bin\Debug" sub folder. That's all, the other files that are distributed along with the binary .zip file can be found in the "dist" sub folder and they need to be placed into the same folder where the .exe is.
Of course you can also change the project to Release configuration and get the resulting binary with some more optimizations, but that really shouldn't make any notable difference as the tool is so small anyway.