Download BOSS for Windows — Jorgensen Research Group, Yale

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BOSS is licensed software.

BOSS is written by William L. Jorgensen and licensed by Cemcomco LLC. It is free to use under the non-profit licence, but it is not public-domain software: installing it means accepting a licence. The form below records that acceptance and then starts your download.

Version: 5.1
Released: October 2024
Download: 65.0 MB
Price: Free, academic

i About this build

For Windows 10 and 11. Unzip and go — nothing else to install. Verified by an automated run on a real Windows machine.

Manuals: BOSS 5.1 · BOSS 4.9, for older installations · MCPRO.

1. Who is downloading it?

Stored as the licence record. We do not use it for anything else.

Full name Academic email Ending in .edu, or your university's or research institute's own domain. Institution or company Type of organization

2. Which licence applies to you?

Please read the one that covers your use before accepting it.

Non-profit / academic Read the licence (PDF) Install and use on any computers in one department of a college, university or other non-profit organization. More than one department needs a multi-department or site licence. Commercial / for-profit Read the licence (PDF) For use in a commercial organization. Cemcomco LLC sells this licence — please read it before installing, and contact us if your use falls under it.

I have read the licence I selected and I accept it. I understand that ticking this box is my acceptance of these terms, with the same effect as a signature.

Installing it

Install it, step by step.

Windows

Extract the zip somewhere with a short path

Extract BOSS51w.zip at the top of a drive so you end up with C:\boss. BOSS truncates paths past 80 characters and then reports a missing file, so avoid deep folders like Desktop\Downloads chains or OneDrive paths.
```
rem In File Explorer: right-click BOSS51w.zip → Extract All → C:\
rem You should now have C:\boss with BOSS.exe inside
```
Point BOSSdir at the install

The .bat scripts find everything through the %BOSSdir% environment variable. setx stores it permanently — close and reopen the Command Prompt afterwards so it takes effect.
```
setx BOSSdir C:\boss
```
Leave cygwin1.dll where it is

The bundled note is explicit: miscexec\cygwin1.dll is a library autozmat needs — do not delete it or move it out of that folder.
```
rem nothing to run — just don't tidy it away
```
Check it computes

In a new Command Prompt, this optimises ethylene glycol via the xOPT batch script, the same first check we use on Mac and Linux. If out contains Optimized energy =, BOSS is working — these exact steps pass on our automated Windows test run.
```
mkdir %USERPROFILE%\bosstest && cd /d %USERPROFILE%\bosstest
copy %BOSSdir%\testjobs\consearch\etdiol.z .
set PATH=%BOSSdir%\scripts;%BOSSdir%\miscexec;%PATH%
call xOPT etdiol
findstr "Optimized" out
```

One thing no guide will tell you: BOSS's x* scripts do not check whether each step worked. A script can print a success message, exit cleanly and still leave you with an empty output file. Before trusting a run, check that the files you expected are actually there and not zero bytes.