The Forge archive includes a MANUAL.txt file and we ask that you spend a few minutes reading this file as it contains some information that may prove useful. We do tend to update this file at times and you should quickly read this file and look for new information for each and every new release. Thank you.

The archive format used for the Forge distribution is ".tar.bz2". There are utilities for Windows, Mac OS and the various *nix's that can be used to extract/decompress these ".tar.bz2" archives. We recommend that you extract/decompress the Forge archive into a new and unused folder.

Some people use the Windows application 7zip. This utility can be found at http://www.7-zip.org/download.html. Mac users can double click on the archive and the application Archive Utility will launch and extract the archive. Mac users do not need to download a separate utility.

Once the Forge archive has been decompressed you should then be able to launch Forge by using the included launcher. Launching Forge by double clicking on the forge jar file in the past caused a java heap space error. Forge's memory requirements have increased over time and the launchers increase the java heap space available to Forge. Currently you can launch Forge by double clicking on the forge jar file without a java heap space error but this is likely to change as we add in more sounds, icons, etc.

- The Mac OS application version -
We haven't been able to distribute the OS X Application version of Forge in sometime. We've recently automated our release tools, and will continue to look in the viability of creating this file now that things are autoamted.
