How to obtain 101Cats

Last modified: 08 March 2025

101Cats is a free application distributed under a BSD style licence which permits anyone to take a copy for their own use and to redistribute freely. The licence terms of 101Cats forbid its sale at a profit - although the cost of enforcement means that it is unlikely that this would be actively chased. The latest official release, together with earlier releases is available for download from this website using the links below. This is, undoubtedly, the safest source.

note

101Cats is a Windows program.

101Cats is specifically a Windows program. It is unlikely to run well, if at all, under emulators such as Wine hosted in other operating systems.

UPDATE - I'm currently working on migrating the code from the Mahapps Metro User Interface framework to the Avalonia framework. This is being done to overcome some issues with Mahapps, but an additional benefit of Avalonia is theoretical portability to other operating systems. If ths proves to be successful, versions for MacOS and Linux should be possible.

note

This page describes the current official release V1. If you are looking for the V2 alpha release, see here

Before you start

101Cats is not particularly demanding of the computer on which it is running. Any PC that is capablel of reasonable performance in Windows should be sufficient. For a long time, the author ran it very successfully on an AMD Radeon 5600 with 16Gb of memory and it has demonstrably worked well on less powerful machines.

101Cats was developed under Windows 10 and the development now continues under Windows 11. It should also work well under Windows 8. It has not been tested under earlier versions of Windows and successful operation is unlikely.

Downloading 101Cats.

Download a copy of the installation image using the links below. This will download a file with a name of the form "setup n.n.n.n .zip" where n.n.n.n is the version number. Unzip the contents of this file into a temporary directory and you should see two files:

  • setup.exe

  • Setup2.msi

Execute setup.exe to start the installation process and follow the instructions below.

101Cats is a program that is not widely used and this can trigger false positive warnings from some virus scanning software. The author takes care to keep his development system clean and runs Norton Anti-virus on it at all times. If your anti-virus software flags a warning at any point during the download and installation process, review the details of the warning message. It will probably be a "reputation" type of warning which is saying that this is a rarely seen program and should be regarded with some suspicion.

Downloads

The current released version of 101Cats is V1.2.0.1 and you can download it via this link

Previous versions are available as follows

V1.2.0.0

V1.1.0.1

V1.1.0.0

V1.0.9.12

V1.0.9.11

V1.0.9.9

V1.0.9.7

Installing 101Cats

When you run setup.exe, you will be presented with a fairly standard Windows installation program. If the PC already has a version installed, then that version will first be uninstalled. If there is an existing installation that has been fully configured, that configuration will not be lost. See the notes in the configuration section for information on how to backup your configuration.

There are currently no installation options for 101Cats apart from the installation directory. Configuration files are not stored in the program directory, so it can be left in the Windows default location.

When the installation is complete, you can proceed to perform an initial configuration following the instructions below.