====[ Bulletin 1 -- New Files ]=================================== Computer Connections PCBoard, Washington, D.C., 2400/1200 (202) 547-2008 -- Public; (202) 547-7621 -- Limited Access Brief descriptions and reviews of new files added to the system during August, 1987. ====================== Copyright (c) 1987, Robert S. Blacher. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and disseminate so long as: (1) No remuneration of any kind is received in exchange; and (2) Distribution is without any modification to the contents hereof, including this copyright notice. Any other use is prohibited without express, written permission in advance. ====================== [08-31-87] BOSS0822.ARC 214219 08-31-87 Window Boss v08.22.87/Excellent C window pkg 08-31-87 Supports MS-C,CI C86, Lattice, DLC & Turbo C U/L by Tom Drinkard. This is one of the best of the various C windowing packages on this system, with support for MS-C, CI C86, DataLite C and Turbo C. The big change was the addition of Turbo C support in the 6/87 version. The changes this time seem quite minor, with a few bug fixes and a couple of new routines (faster screen updates for the EGA are mentioned in the BOSS.HST file). Worth having if you do serious work in C, and worth supporting if you use the package. ZIPZAP60.ARC 43443 08-31-87 File/sector binary editor v6.01 Good doc U/L by Jim Bready. I thought ZipZap was the chief sponsor for Network 23 on Max Headroom ... or something like that. Anyway, this looks to be a particularly versatile and flexible binary editor for both disk and/or file manipulation (but I use DISMOD for the former and I'm too used to it to change and Norton for the latter on those *rare* occasions ...). The documentation looks very good. MF_MV102.ARC 16384 08-31-87 Unix-like MOVE util v1.2 * ? handled well This is, as the authors state in the doc, a work in progress. It's a good MOVE utility that will move (copy then delete, really) across drives and do real moves on a single drive (rename full pathname). Wildcard handling is very good, though the claim it beats all others is just wrong -- NMOVE586 handles the same combos of ? and *. However, this is very well documented and seems equally well behaved EXCEPT: It will overwrite a target file with NO warning at all. The authors indicate there will be a confirm switch for this in v1.03. So, careful! Also, 1.03 is supposed to handle moves of an entire subdir tree. That would be a major addition to the arsenal of move utils on this system. TIMSET20.ARC 84886 08-31-87 Call US Nav Obs & set computer's time v2 U/L by Dick Baker. I screwed up, to put it bluntly. I posted a note here the other day that the US Naval Observatory had discontinued the service by which you could call and, with a program like this, set your computer's clock. Wrong! I had heard that story, come up with a phone number for a US NAVOBS computer (which I might as well not repeat), called it, and when I asked it for the time service, got the message that it was discontinued because of overuse/abuse. All well and good but the service I called is NOT the same as the one called by this and other programs. The fact that a *person* I spoke to there gave me misinformation as well .... sigh. Anyway, thanks to Dick Baker for both the file and setting me straight. I have called the number used by this program and, although it's no joy getting through, the service seems alive and well. (Irrelevant postscript: This was sent as a self-extracting archive inside of an ARC. Good grief! It's over 10K smaller now as a regular archive). HAMLOG.ARC 68251 08-31-87 Amateur radio logging/beam heading v1.4 U/L by William Nadzam. From the doc (I have *NO* idea what most of this means): "This program is intended to serve as a logging and information providing tool for the amateur. It is primarily aimed at DX operation and as such provides instantaneous display of beam headings, distance to the other station and local time at that station. In addition an immediate display is provided of any previous contact with the same station, including all pertinent information, along with a summary of your history with that country (worked, qsl'ed or confirmed) by band and by mode." WINDOWS.ARC 132394 08-31-87 Windowing LIB for Clipper Aut '86/Eval copy U/L by Bob Hicks. I'm puzzled by the following statement in the doc: "This is an evaluation copy of the library, functionally it is exactly the same as the copy you will receive when you register, however this copy displays a message on the screen once, and only once, during the execution of a program." [Punctuation is from the original so don't blame me.] If someone who works with this library of routines would like to enlighten me on the practical significance of the above double-speak, I'd appreciate it. MRIM-010.ARC 13163 08-31-87 R:Base Online Tech News - Jul '87. U/L by Bill Behrens. BLINE.ARC 8004 08-31-87 TPas INLINE vers. of Boyer-Moore string srch U/L by Bill Madison. B-M pattern matching is a fast technique for grep-family searches. FCOPY.ARC 8905 08-31-87 Fast disk copy/ dual drive/TPas only Kokkonen U/L by Bill Madison. Over a year old, but by Kokkonen of Turbo Power Software and I just don't recall seeing this before. It's a diskcopy equivalent that can use alternate floppies on dual floppy systems. Source only. LSTDRV.ARC 10544 08-31-87 TPascal intelligent parallel print driver v3 U/L by Bill Madison. LST device driver and printer tab functions in TPas and ASM. v3, 8/2/87 by Mark Brandon. Well documented routines. MEMFIL.ARC 2352 08-31-87 Read/Write files to RAM from TPASCAL progs U/L by Bill Madison. "Creates an area in memory that can be treated like a file by reading and writing the USR device. As implemented here, the area has a maximum size of MaxInt bytes." REMIND.ARC 36682 08-31-87 Memory jogger at boot time w/TPas source U/L by Bill Madison. Similar in concept to Chris Dunford's MJOG, this is a non-TSR (like MJOG) that can be run from AUTOEXEC.BAT to remind you of things to do, upcoming events, etc. The bonus here is that the Turbo Pascal source is included. DOS33PAS.ARC 2172 08-31-87 File handle manipulation DOS 3.3 only TPas U/L by Bill Madison. "This program illustrates how to return the file handle for a Turbo Pascal file, how to return the DOS version currently running, how to set the number of file handles in DOS 3.3, and how to commit a file to disk in DOS 3.3. Use these routines freely at your own risk. This program SHOULD work on any IBM (or supermega compatable) running PC-DOS 3.3 or greater." TURBOL.ARC 24876 08-31-87 X-REF lister for Turbo Pascal COM/DOC U/L by Bill Madison. Bill's description of this when he uploaded it was EXCELLENT!! and as he works in Turbo Pascal and I don't .... Source not included. DCBB0987.ARC 17524 08-30-87 200 + verified DC area IBM BBS #'s 9/87 U/L & compiled by Mike Focke. BASWIN22.ARC 39131 08-30-87 Windows LIB for QuickBasic /Dave Evers v2.2 U/L by Edwin Schmerling. A very good LIBrary for QuickBASIC programming. See also BWTOOL01.ARC by the same author. PROTYMER.ARC 4221 08-30-87 Start/stop time logging of modem usage/ProComm U/L and written by Steve Hoglund. The ansi codes drove the screen on my XT clone bonkers when I tried this very briefly. Hope you have better luck. FRM2PR6A.ARC 16538 08-30-87 Convert dBase3 .FRM to .PRG v06.a Freeland U/L by Gerhard Barth. A beta of a program that will not be free or shareware, but rather part of Freeland's db utility package. I have a conflict of interest on this one in that it also relates to a book being worked on by Pete Olympia, a good friend, so I won't be able to comment further. TXT2COM2.ARC 13980 08-30-87 Convert txt to COM v2.0 w/TSR optn;072787/KPG U/L by Bob Weinstein. Keith Graham's excellent program for converting text files to COM files (and back again), with full-screen paging and ansi color controls. Major change in v2 is a new program that can create TSR COM files from text files. It's very easy to use and works fine. Hotkeys can be altered. One caveat and a tip (how's that!): The TSR's don't check to see if they're already loaded. No big deal, though you can end up with duplicates of these wasting memory unless you keep track of what you're doing. There's also no un-install from mem capability, but Kokkonen's MARK/RELEASE programs worked fine with this when I tried it. CTRL-P.ARC 633 08-30-87 Fake a Ctrl-PrtSc for batch files, K.P.Graham U/L by Bob Weinstein. QUIKTA21.ARC 81315 08-30-87 Quiktalk 2.1: Small comm program w/Ymodem U/L by Loren Olson. How things have changed: My minimum standards for a comm program used to be only that it did Ymodem (Xmodem-1k, actually). Now, the first thing I check is how easily you can call DSZ from the program for Zmodem transfers. This one does have a SHELL to DOS capability, but that's about it, and not a terribly convenient way to call DSZ. Other than that, the author makes a point of saying he cloned the look and feel of Lotus' menu structure. I'm not raising this in the context of the legal debate -- I just happen not to love that particular interface, though I tolerate it in Lotus because the spreadsheet is so damned good. ROD-PR.ARC 16827 08-30-87 TSR ProPrinter controller v1.0 ROD-FX.ARC 16723 08-30-87 TSR FX printer controller v1.0 U/L by Frank Sherwood. Untested -- hardware not available. BASE.ARC 32346 08-29-87 Mathematical base conversions U/L by Richard Campany. I flunked new math as a kid and I'm not about to try to rectify that deficiency now. XFI.ARC 25896 08-29-87 Menu interface to extrnal protocls/DSZ/Mankin U/L by Don Heckman. Not bad. If your program doesn't already have a way of calling external protocols short of shelling to DOS and invoking them manually (or via batch files), you may find this menu-driven module convenient. And, you won't have to learn the DSZ commands, though they're not very complicated. LJPR.ARC 29551 08-29-87 HP LJ page print: 2-4 per page/double-sided U/L by Jim Chenvert. Untested -- hardware not available. From the docs: "This program is a utility to print documents on an HP LaserJet Printer. The document is divided, by the program, into pages based on FF's or line count or a combination of both. It will print the pages one or four on a sheet in portrait orientation and two on a sheet in landscape. It will also print one-sided, two-sided, or in a booklet format. It will handle letter and legal size paper. It will expand tabs, such as used by assemblers and compilers in producing listings, with blanks." ICPR20.ARC 60989 08-29-87 ProComm/PC Pursuit Command file generator U/L by Hewie Poplock. PCALL1-1.ARC 14308 08-29-87 Menu interface for Telix Zmodem xfers v1.1 Apparently, the authors plan to make this program generic. At the moment, it is hardcoded to DSZ.COM and TELIX. If you use TELIX, you may find this very handy. It's quite fast and clean -- more so than XFI which is a bit more generic and would be used by ProComm folks, for example. QEDIT137.ARC 92035 08-29-87 Quick text EDITor, WS-Like,Multi-file v1.37 08-29-87 Fully configurable, very fast/among the best! U/L by John Jenkins. Bless, Sammy. In addition to writing an excellent editor, he also provides update notes. Here's the latest (edited a bit) covering 1.36b through 1.37: * Entab was putting tabs inside of quoted strings. Fixed. * Added "MakeCtrOfScreen" command. This command moves the cursorline to the center of the screen. * Return now "splits line" in in insert mode or cursorline = numlines. * Added the "InsertLine" command. This command inserts a line "before" the cursorline (as opposed to the "AddLine" command) and positions the cursor at the first of this newly inserted line. * Add "getdir" after shell command in case user changes dirs * Add "random_name" function to return a "semi" random name based on the current time. * Change format of statusline. Put up to 44 chars of path on it. As you can see, the changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary, but some nice touches on an already excellent package. Wish Sammy could be persuaded to work on the word-wrap a bit when inserting in an existing line. I'd quickly switch to Qedit for this bulletin! NU-INT24.ARC 6798 08-29-87 Revised handling of critical errs:TPas 8/87 U/L by Tom Drinkard. A 3rd approach, to add to two proposed by Bela Lubkin. Good discussion included in the source. PCTJ8706.ARC 18659 08-29-87 Source from IBM PC Tech Journal - June 87 PCTJ8707.ARC 11961 08-29-87 Source from IBM PC Tech Journal - July 87 U/L by Bill Wood. JOURN104.ARC 9880 08-28-87 Record/Replay Keystrokes/Mouse in MS Windows U/L by Ed Hopper. Untested -- software unavailable. VOL6N16.ARC 55035 08-27-87 PC Mag Vol 6 #16: KBX & RN ASM/BAS/COM U/L by Mike Focke. PC Mag no longer provides capsule docs as they did once upon a time, and these keep showing up before my copy of the magazine! HENON.ARC 42131 08-27-87 Henon benchmark tests w & w/o 8087 TPascal U/L by Robert Moore. MONYCNTS.ARC 194825 08-27-87 MONEY COUNTS 3.94b Home financial mgt/acct'g U/L by David Geerinck. No docs at all, but a fair amount of on-line help. I guess a manual is sent to registered users. GEOCHRON.ARC 55635 08-27-87 Graphic display of time around the world v1.0 U/L by Neil Erbe. TC130.ARC 165248 08-27-87 "Steve's LIBrary for Turbo C" v1.30 Small mdl U/L by Richard Kinoshita. A varied, well-documented set of Turbo C routines for the small memory model. Support for other models and the source is sent to registered users. Includes some nice utils with their source as an example. CLRS.ARC 3143 08-27-87 Clear screen keeping the color attribute w/ASM U/L & written by Ray Moon. Clears the screen without resetting colors. EGA compatible. ASM source included. v1.0. CMENU4E.ARC 34182 08-27-87 Fast menu shell by Dan Doman 4.0E 8-1-87 No update notes at all, so I've no idea what has changed (except they are now smaller EXE files rather than COM files). This is an excellent, fast little DOS menu program. It's very easy to use and setup. DBMGR21.ARC 122273 08-27-87 Simple data base mngr v2.1: Ascii files/easy Very reminiscent of MINIBASE, this one also is just a simple, little flat-file database manager which keeps both its data (.MAS) and field description (.LBL) files in ascii format. The index file is not. What I like about this one is how you design the input screens -- you just move the cursor around with your arrow keys and plunk each field where you want it. Makes things much more readable that way. Only the first field is indexed, but in fact you can search on any field. All in all, a useful cardfile-type database program that won't threaten Ashton-Tate. PCCURSES.ARC 88313 08-27-87 Unix-like cursor/window control v1.0 MS-C 3/4 USENET posting, 8/24/87, of a very complete imitation of the UNIX curses package for MS-DOS. Files have been unshar'd and converted to DOS format. A 'make' program is also included (which came across the net as a uuencode inside a shar -- I'm astonished that it arrived intact ). Documentation is OK -- not great -- and assumes familiarity with the Unix equivalent. BIOPAT11.ARC 5231 08-26-87 Biopatch v1.1 - fix AT&T DOS 3.2 slow clocks U/L by Scott Pazur. DEBLIB.ARC 75338 08-26-87 Deblib v1.0 - QB library to pgm AT&T DEB U/L by Scott Pazur. GEMCAP.ARC 4628 08-26-87 TSR screen capture to GEM.IMG file U/L by Melvin Douglas. Particularly useful. I'd imagine, for those who want to import screens into Ventura. PCMENU.ARC 144533 08-26-87 Sophisticated menu program/ AutoMenu DEF 08-26-87 compatible/quite fast/includes editor/v1.0 U/L by Neal Machtiger. Gee, someone's trying to give Marshall Magee of AutoMenu fame a run for it. PC-MENU looks quite powerful. It's written in C and runs quickly; it's well-documented; it's colorful and pretty; it's compatible with some AutoMenu files to make converting easier; it allows you to assign quick commands to 26 Alt-key combos; and it has some unique capabilities to pass some info between 2 or more programs. Add to that an editor (which looks to be pretty much the Borland ToolBox editor) and you've got quite a package. Very professionally done and this package quickly joins the top ranks of those in the field. MATHSHOP.ARC 65799 08-26-87 Math tutorial, ages 6-12, interactive/EXE only U/L by Neal Machtiger. ZCOMMEXE.ARC 139428 08-26-87 / Multi-protocol support/term emulatns v16.83 ZCOMMHLP.ARC 99314 08-26-87 \ Powerful/complex/X/Y/Z/WXmodem/Kermt 8/25/87 Recent changes (from the update notes -- yes folks, update notes!): 16.83 adds the "kermreset" string parameter. A string (up to 32 characters) may be sent by Pro-YAM's Kermit when it attempts to recover from a transmission error. The default value for this string is empty. Two metacharacters are special: \336 inserts a one second pause, \335 sends a break. 16.82 Fixes the operation of XMODEM Overthruster(TM) when the "zmodem o" parameter is 0 (for CIS XMODEM). To use XMODEM OverThruster on CIS: "zmodem po0; ro file1.ext". To use XMODEM OverThruster on GEnie: "zmodem po30; ro file1.ext". The optimum value for the "zmodem o" parameter must be determined by experiment; 60 might give best results with MNP modems at 2400 bps. 16.81 Improves the operation and error recovery of ZMODEM downloaded commands. Error recovery in the context of file skipping was corrected. The "sz" command no longer allows fallback to YMODEM (this was a reliability problem); the "szb" command does allow YMODEM fallback. SLIC2.ARC 182397 08-25-87 Intgrated WordProc, SprSh, Filer & Comm 2.0 U/L by Loren Olson. I didn't see any update notes. A quick run with the program showed some fairly substantial changes. I've said in the past that I think this program is overly-ambitious. The commercial integrated packages have trouble maintaining quality across all the modules, much less this shareware effort. Still, a good intro to the various capabilities for which PCs are most often used. TCURS.ARC 8632 08-25-87 Set cursor speed in programs/TSR/8/87 Somewhat like Revolution Software's Cruise Control (some of the commands are even the same), this one lets you speed up your cursor within application programs. The speedup can be turned on/off. There's also a pop-up alarm clock that's pretty simple. The problem is this program allows cursor run-on, whereas HOTKEY11, while much simpler than this, stops the cursor as soon as you release a key. DBMENU28.ARC 70528 08-25-87 dBASE III + Menu Writing System v2.8 8/87 An applications menu-generator that supports dBASE III PLUS Ver: 1.1 (or compatible operating environment), FoxBASE or FoxBASE +, Clipper, dBCOMPILER or QuickSilver. PROGGEN3.ARC 19445 08-25-87 Alan Simpson's dBase applicatn genrator 8/87 Some fixes. TPLV50.ARC 90482 08-25-87 The Private Line: DES Encryption 8/87 v5.00 DES is actually a hardward standard, but I gather this comes as close to implementing in software as any other on this system. v5 adds the welcome ability to run this program from the command line as well as from menus. GSETUP20.ARC 19900 08-25-87 Generic SETUP program for AT & clones v2.0 Does pretty much everything the AT's SETUP program does, including configuring your system, parking the disk, etc. The difference is this one can run from your hard disk, rather than having to dig out your original diagnostics floppy. v2.0 is much prettier (you know, some windows and stuff) and has a few fixes. SIN.ARC 62603 08-25-87 Lalonde's Search for strings IN files v2.4a What a name for a program! Anyway, to quote: "Search for a given string in specified files down from any directory. Skip binary files (by extension at your choice). Displays filename, line number and the text of line containing the string. Fast screen output. This version supports Microsoft mouse (or compatible) and works with either color and monochrome display. Attributes or colors configuration can be saved in code file. Sin can send its output to the printer or a text file." In addition to SIN, the complete collection of utils by Jean Lalonde is now on the system (SUB, SUBA, DDUP and FILL). My 2 favorites are SUB and FILL, but they all share common strengths (and weaknesses) and are well-worth a look. CLEANUP.ARC 34123 08-24-87 Strips IBM graphic chars. from text files 1.0 U/L by James Austin. FORMFIT.ARC 111129 08-24-87 Create/fill out/print pre-printed forms v2.0 U/L by Greg Nordstrom. With EZ-FORMS having gone commercial, it's nice to have another full-fledged forms generator in addition to FORMGEN. FormFit looks quite powerful yet easy to use. v2.0 is a major update with more features than can be listed here. Worth a look. POE110.ARC 49745 08-24-87 Run other programs (Zmodem, etc.) from ProComm U/L by Neal Machtiger. WDBFPO2.ARC 7115 08-24-87 Which .DBF goes w/ which .NDX ? P. Olympia v2 Fixes a bug in v1.0, this is a handy program to have around to associate DBF and NDX files. Wildcards OK. TO.ARC 5099 08-24-87 ChDir keystroke saver: shorthand refs v1.1 Very similar to GOTO, you create a list of your subdirs and then label them with a shorthand reference. So, instead of CD \UTILS\OPTIM\VOPT, you can type TO VO instead. Written in ASM so smaller and faster than GOTO, it was a little strangely behaved on this computer under a multi-tasker (and my other computer has PCED which makes this kind of tool unnecessary). SET-TYPE.ARC 6152 08-23-87 Include files C set types like in Turbo Pascal Imitates the set type function from Turbo Pascal in C. PCACT211.ARC 191276 08-23-87 \ Personal accounting system w/database PCDOC211.ARC 70698 08-23-87 / & regular check printing v2.11 full version Good for the author of this package. 2.05 was crippled; this one is not. A very powerful accounting package for home or small business use, PCACT also prints on regular check forms. WSX20A.ARC 61923 08-23-87 WordStar 4.0/3.3 to/fr ascii translator v2.0A A very good WS to/from ASCII translator, this one hits you with an annoying reminder to pay up every time you exit from the program (it sits on your screen for a good ten seconds). OK201.ARC 72324 08-22-87 OPTIKS v2.01, graphics viewer,etc, K.Graham U/L by Jim Chenvert. GTCTL521.ARC 106387 08-22-87 GT PowerComm host mode utility v5.21 J. Davis U/L by Raymond Wood. GF.ARC 18829 08-22-87 DECUS grep w/replace ported to MS-C 3.0 7/87 U/L by Rick Jones. A pretty good imitation of Unix grep with replace capabilities added. Not awfully fast. GGREP.ARC 17114 08-22-87 Fgrep & Egrep in one program/on-line help From a USENET posting, this one has the pattern search capabilities of fgrep and egrep built into one DOS program. CTDESK27.ARC 122378 08-22-87 CityDesk v2.70: Simple desktop publishing Sorry -- can't review this one as it requires an IBM/Epson type printer and that's not what I've got. VPT201.ARC 20021 08-22-87 VGA palette tool v2.01: Set modes for VGA No VGA here. UUPC-IBM.ARC 47288 08-26-87 UUPC binaries for IBM: UU.EXE & MAIL.EXE UUPC-DCP.ARC 24226 08-22-87 \ Unix-to-PC (and vice versa) \ Communicator UUPC-UU.ARC 14843 08-22-87 / mail system: 8/87 USENET / Mailer UUPC-DOC.ARC 16675 08-22-87 \ posting. Provides primitive\ READMEs UUPC-DOS.ARC 27445 08-22-87 / 'mail' program on the PC / DOS specific UUPC-AMI.ARC 28137 08-22-87 \ and a uucico-type program \ Amiga UUPC-MAC.ARC 10143 08-22-87 / for communicating with uucp / MacIntosh UUPC-MCL.ARC 17616 08-22-87 \ running on a Unix system. \ More Mac UUPC-ST.ARC 25606 08-22-87 / Source code only/ltd docs / Atari ST Makes *some* of the functions of Unix mail/uucp available on a PC, this program is still very much in development and it's quite rough. Still, it does work -- sort of. The documentation is dreadful. If you can't read the code to see how to operate this program, you're in trouble. I'm not making this sound too inviting, am I? Well, for those who can deal with it, the package has a lot of potential down the road. For now, it's generating a lot of interest on USENET but I suspect it won't be used too often. If you want the DOS version, I'd suggest you take the first 5 archives. You're on your own for the Amiga, MAC and ST versions (and I have some doubts about the integrity of the Amiga files as they came over the net in what looked to be a badly built shell archive). All files have been unshar'd and converted to DOS format with Chuck Forsberg's 'todos' program. A few filenames had to be truncated to make them legal under DOS, but I think you'll have no trouble figuring out which those were. Thanks to Ken Brown and Richard Byrne for helping put this set together. WSSI320A.ARC 109110 08-22-87 \ Powerful hard disk & floppy catalog WSSI320B.ARC 107436 08-22-87 / program / processes ARCs v3.20 8/87 The update notes go on for quite a while (see BUGLIST.DOC in the first arc). Suffice it to say that there are quite a few changes in this program, one of the "BIG 3" disk catalog'rs on this system. PCKERM21.ARC 33149 08-22-87 PCKermit v2.1, 19.2 bps & pop-up windows New window routines designed to cure an interrupt problem that cropped up in 2.0. DSZ0821.ARC 48826 08-22-87 Forsberg's X/Y/Zmodem transfer module 8/21/87 08-22-87 Turbo C version with I/O buffering & SHARE DSZ0821X.ARC 40987 08-22-87 Cross-compiled vrsn of DSZ/faster at 19.2 bps 08-22-87 Uses more memory/no SHARE or buffering 8/21/87 Three documented changes: (1) No more fallback from Zmodem to Ymodem; (2) A fix in CRC/Xmodem fallback; and (3) Better error-handling when skipping a file. But, there's an undocumented change that's *very* significant: DSZ now both reduces AND increases packet size on the fly during transfers to maximize Zmodem efficiency. Default packet size is 512 bytes, but it will jump to 1K after 16K worth of clean transmission, and then turn around and drop back to 512 and even 256 bytes if some errors occur. And, yes, it will turn around and upshift again if the line clears up. It's quite remarkable to watch and a major enhancement to this already excellent protocol implementation. NOTE: If you've been forcing packet size to 1K on your DSZ send command line with a z pL1024, take it out and let DSZ 8/21 do its thing! RZSZ0821.ARC 64719 08-22-87 Forsberg's Unix X/Y/Zmodem source 8/21/87 No update notes this time. Unix rz and sz do not do the up/downshift in packet size that's in the DOS implementation. OPTIMISE.ARC 20935 08-22-87 Find optimum interleave/reformat HD/w/ASM U/L by David Geerinck. NOT for AT's or 386 machines, this program will try to determine the optimum interleave factor for a PC/XT's hard disk and then low-level format to achieve it. Needless to say (?), you need to backup all files first as the entire contents of your disk will be destroyed. Hopefully, you also have another low-level format program around that you know works in case this one doesn't! MAGICDIR.ARC 4720 08-22-87 Create HD directories hidden from DOS U/L by David Geerinck. EEMRAM11.ARC 17380 08-21-87 Increase DOS conventional mem to 704-736K 08-21-87 using EEMS (e.g. AST Rampage)/C. Dunford 1.01 U/L & written by Chris Dunford. Some changes that may allow the program to work with earlier versions of EEMS drivers (pre 3.2). Also includes a new program that gives you info about what areas of display memory are available for this program to use. For more on this excellent program, see discussion of EEMRAM.ARC. SUMDOS2.ARC 85776 08-21-87 PD Sidekick work-alike w/DOS shell/comm v2 U/L by Alan Samuels. A TSR that includes the following: Calculator, Note Pad, Communications, Disk Utilities, Read text Files, Phone Dialer, Screen Saver, ASCII Table, Monthly Calendar and a Write Screen function that allows you to Write Screens to Disk. All in all, quite well done. No update notes indicate what's new in this version. T_ENHANC.ARC 128882 08-21-87 Turbo Pascal Enhancement Toolkit 2.10/Video U/L by Tim Conner. Looks like a good collection of TPas routines, focusing on screen management. P260.ARC 32641 08-21-87 "Super Printing Utility" v2.60/Formatter U/L by Neal Machtiger. Very good page print util, v2.6 supports an environment variable to point to the config file and a "script" file method of choosing from the many options this program has. PPRINT33.ARC 58984 08-21-87 Patriquin's Page Print util w/prntr defs v3.3 U/L by Neal Machtiger. Recent changes include the ability to send a reset string to your printer when finished and some diagnostic aids that will help you see what control codes are being sent to the printer. An excellent, flexible page print util, with DEF files included for the HP LJ, IBM ProPrinter and Epsons. ARCMAS11.ARC 52726 08-21-87 ArcMaster 1.1:Front end for Katz/Buerg utils U/L by Neal Machtiger. STYLED20.ARC 117463 08-21-87 Text style analyzer v2.0 Good doc & examples U/L by Paul Gorski. To be terse: No update notes. Reportedly faster. OK, how'd I score on that one? ~ FC-VER2.ARC 180801 08-20-87 Stilwell's Spreadsheet v2.0 Easy/Rudimentary U/L by James MacDonald. I can't do any better than the description that's in the READ.ME file: " FreeCalc is a spreadsheet program with numerous features. It has been expanded from Version 1.0 and is a mature product. While it lacks some of the features and power of a product like Lotus 1-2-3, it also lacks Lotus' high price. It is a nice spreadsheet program that is more than adequate for most applications. It uses all of available memory (up to 640K), allows installation of color if you have a color monitor, and is command bar driven. The disk manual is very complete, and is 106 pages long." PRO020.ARC 113114 08-20-87 Proteus v0.20 - MS-Windows 1.03+ comm pgm U/L by Loren Olson. Yes, you can have Ymodem (even batch) under Windows, too. The version of this program for Windows v2 will be commercial. ISSUE37.ARC 15583 08-20-87 Micro Cornucopia Issue 37 source code U/L by Tadas Osmolskis. INT24-TC.ARC 9723 08-20-87 Turbo C--interrupt 24 handler (critical err.) U/L by Marty DelVecchio. PROBILL.ARC 13378 08-20-87 Lotus 1-2-3 time billing WKS for professionals U/L by Tony Ciconte. NICKL-11.ARC 31975 08-20-87 Batch-driven DOS menu system v1.1 easy/simple U/L by Neal Machtiger. Yikes, yet-another-menu system, this one's claim to fame is not features but ease of use. SUB33A.ARC 48946 08-20-87 Find & apply DOS commands to files v3.3a 8/87 Now allows an exclusion list in the files spec, and you can also "J"ump to the directory of a file found by SUB. There a lots of other changes in this excellent utility, including the fact that it will respond to a control-c during a search (yay!). This is a great program for looking for files, even across multiple hard disks, and then deleting, renaming, moving them, etc. A big help on this system from time to time. MPMDEF.ARC 8252 08-20-87 MPM/Citizen Printer defs for WordPerfect 4.2 U/L by Luis Zapata. DOCKT-EX.ARC 107011 08-20-87 Clipper-compiled version of PRG in DOCKET.ARC U/L by Ted DeCastro. Don't think we want to make a habit of compiling the dBase programs that show up or we're gonna run out of room here fast, but ... here for a little bit. DOCKET is an attorney's docket tracking/suspense program. SPEEDER.ARC 2230 08-19-87 Speed PC (chng DMA to RAM refresh)/ASM/Hanlin U/L & written by Tom Hanlin. May give you a 5% or so speed boost on your PC by changing the DMA to RAM refresh rate. Untested on ATs (and I'm not brave enough to run it on this one with everything else that's running here. Volunteers?). Seemed to work fine on my XT clone but I'm not sure how you would benchmark the performance gains. FASTVI2.ARC 34724 08-19-87 Turbo C video/windows LIB 1.01 Tiny/Small mdls U/L by Marty DelVecchio. Includes a demo program and sufficient info to make use of the LIBrary. ADIR.ARC 10858 08-19-87 Sorted DIR; exploded ARC & LBR files; ANSI U/L by Dave Blevins. The capabilities of this program are fine, but it leaves my screen in the colors chosen by the program. Yuk. A /P helps. The doc is terrible but the on-line help is quite good. Type ADIR /H. ONEACH.ARC 211199 08-19-87 Virtual scrn programmer's editor v1.03 64K max U/L by Dave Blevins. This is written in Turbo Prolog which explains its size and the fact that it can only handle files 64K or smaller. It looks like a competent editor, but ... is this really the right language for a project of this kind? TSR-TC.ARC 25835 08-19-87 TSR clock and dir programs in Turbo C 5/87 U/L by Marty DelVecchio. Neither of the programs is very exciting, but they're meant as demonstrations of achieving TSR in Turbo C. FE400-1.ARC 120674 08-18-87 \ FILE EXPRESS: Shareware data base system FE400-2.ARC 121430 08-18-87 / v4.00 8/1/87 Easy to use, yet powerful FE400-3.ARC 119352 08-18-87 \ Now includes 26 page "Evaluation Guide" FE400-4.ARC 121348 08-18-87 / rather than complete documentation Shoot. The programs from Expressware have always been examples of shareware at its best. With this version of File Express, they have decided to include very limited documentation and send the full 300+ page printed manual to registered users only. That being said, the program is very easy to use and I honestly can't imagine what would justify such a long manual. But, what you do get here is *VERY* limited, just barely enough to evaluate the program. The FE.DOC file is non-ascii and must be printed with the supplied PRINTDOC program. But, I did grab the update notes out of it by redirecting printer output to disk and I've put those in the first arc under the name WHATS.NEW. The changes are, indeed, quite substantial and will necessitate converting all your old FE files with the supplied CONVERT program. FE used to have it's own bulletin on this system. With the omission of full documentation from the FE shareware package, that bulletin will be put to other uses. My thanks to Mark Rapp for letting me tie up his MicroSellar BBS in New Jersey much too long in downloading these 4 large files. Mark obtained the files on disk from Expressware. He also tells me that 4.01 with a few bug fixes is due in a couple of weeks. It's up to you whether you want to wait. XLISP20S.ARC 111082 08-18-87 XLISP 2.0 source in C, 7/19/87 update notes U/L by Winston Llamas. Update notes are in XLISP.2 which can be viewed via one of the DOORs here. Assumes you already have an earlier edition of XLISP for complete documentation. A sample init file is also included. OPT10BLD.ARC 4948 08-18-87 HP LaserJet Optima 10 PS Bold Font OPT10ITL.ARC 6042 08-18-87 HP LaserJet Optima 10 PS Italic Font U/L by Gerald Price. SETMODEM.ARC 13893 08-18-87 Setup program for Hayes-compat modems w/TPas U/L by Gerald Price. Pretty simple program to send AT strings to a modem. QLIB.ARC 36666 08-18-87 Fast Screen LIB for Turbo C large model 3.0 U/L by Richard Kinoshita. The documentation, such as it is, is in QWELCOME.COM, but there's also a demo program showing use of the routines and all in all, I suspect there's enough info here to make use of the LIB. Source sent to registered users. SD32.ARC 45329 08-18-87 Enhanced ChDir v3.2/can link to [P]CED w/A86 U/L & written by Stephen Falatko. A very useful CD program, best when made part of CED or PCED, Chris Dunford's Command EDitors. New in 3.2 is a directory "stack" feature that can maintain an internal stack of up to 10 drive/path specs, referred to by typing numbers. This new feature is only available when the program is enqueued to [P]CED. Source in A86 included. MEALMATE.ARC 74581 08-17-87 Nutrition database, food/recipe/meals v2.01 U/L by [ ??? Lost Record]. A pretty complete database of foods for meal planning, etc. CDISK360.ARC 133958 08-17-87 CATDISK v3.60 excellent disk catalog/R.Hillier U/L by Scott Pazur. One of the best disk catalog programs, edited update notes: " Added support for 32 levels of subdirectories and a total of 128 subdirectories per disk. Added a new report that allows you to select a list of files based on the file comments (or a portion of a comment). For example: searching for GAME would match "Game", "GAME", or "Arcade Game". Fixed a small cosmetic error occurring upon completion of editing file commments at certain times." EEMRAM.ARC 8705 08-17-87 Increase DOS conventional mem to 704-736K 08-17-87 using EEMS (e.g. AST Rampage)/C. Dunford 1.00 This is really a break-through program. When I first got my AST Rampage for this AT over a year ago, I wondered whether there was some way to use part of the EEMS memory for DOS conventional memory. My XT has a special card and driver to do just that and has 704K of RAM available to all my programs. It seemed to me that the same just *had* to be possible with an EEMS card, but no program was around to allow it. Well, now there is. Interestingly, for the past few weeks, I have been using a program just like EEMRAM (but with fewer options, actually) that's a beta of a commercial program not yet released. That program brought this machine up to 704K conventional memory and is the reason why shells to external protocols are available on both nodes here. But, the program I've been using isn't out yet, and as I mentioned, will be commercial. Chris Dunford has released this excellent program for free. OK -- here's what you need. An Enhanced Expanded Memory Standard card (EEMS, *NOT* plain old EMS). AST and Quadram cards are EEMS, as are others. That's it. Just run EEMRAM first in AUTOEXEC.BAT and presto -- 64-96K of EEMS memory will become DOS conventional memory and CHKDSK will now tell you that your machine has 704-736K of memory installed. The amount of EEMS that can be converted to conventional memory depends on the display adapter you are using. If you have an EGA, it's unlikely that this program will work for you as the display memory it needs is probably in use by the EGA. But, no matter what your adapter, give it a try and see if it works. This program is a joy for EEMS card users, and the unique feature of EEMRAM is that it can be uninstalled to give you back your EEMS memory should you wish it for another purpose. All in all, truly a gem if you have the hardware that makes this all possible. Thanks, Chris. DDUP11.ARC 30340 08-17-87 Delete or rename duplicate files: LaLonde 1.1 Another search your whole hard disk for dupe files program, I found this one a bit strange on syntax and all in all, not as good as other excellent programs by this author, including FILL and SUBS. FILL15.ARC 34529 08-17-87 Efficient copying from HD to floppies v1.5 The changes aren't major, but this is just a super program for copying files from your hard disk to floppies when it's going to take more than 1 floppy to hold the files. OV150.ARC 78954 08-17-87 OverView File/Disk Management Utility v1.50 U/L by Charles Kleis. The changes to this excellent sweep utility aren't major, but it's worth the update. Alas, the author has decided to stop distributing the source code in order to "maintain ... control over the program." That's a shame as the source was an invaluable learning tool. The source for v1.43 will remain on this system. QF23-F.ARC 72609 08-17-87 Qfiler 2.3F Sweep util/file manager K.Flee A very good sweep utility, v2.3F solves a problems with creating subdirs with a space in their name. Z_VS_ML.ARC 32515 08-16-87 "Discussion" of Zmodem vs MegaLink/CIS thread This is a capture of the recent series of messages between Chuck Forsberg, Paul Meiners and others on CompuServe about the relative merits and demerits of Zmodem and MegaLink. I debated about whether to post this but, in the end, decided that there's enough useful info in here to warrant making it available, even if the tone of the debate seems to have degenerated into personalities and irrelevancies from time to time. Also, as I had heard about "Modemgate" and had some prurient curiousity but no access to CIS, I guess others will be in the same situation. With that introduction, it's here for a bit so you can read the messages and come to your own conclusions. CCUR26.ARC 17044 08-16-87 Lundin's Counting Cursor (ruler) v2.6 / TSR Adds the ability to blank the screen on demand. That strikes me as somewhat non-germane to this excellent program and not worth issuing an update for so soon. Oh well, it's a small file. XTAB.ARC 12949 08-16-87 Expands tabs/takes ambig file specs/Turbo C U/L & written by Mark Thomas. "XTAB expands tab characters to spaces as determined by TABSTOP. If, TABSTOP is not specified, a default value of eight is used. One or more files can be specified using a valid DOS ambiguous filename. Original file backups are kept with filename extensions of "TBU". If the optional switch -B is specified, backup files will not be made." PCL105.ARC 69102 08-16-87 Windows 1.05/PageMaker HP LJ+/Series II drvrs U/L by Joseph Collins. A86CNVRT.ARC 49507 08-16-87 Example of converting MASM to A86/Isaacson U/L by Lewis Paper. Describes how to convert PC Mag's SETUP.ASM (printer setup util) to A86 as an example of the conversion process. TOPBRD3.ARC 5910 08-16-87 Top BBS list 8/87: Excellent taste! (ahem) U/L & written by Jim Robeson. One user's reviews of "top" boards. 8/11/87 edition. See comments on TOPBRD.ARC. REGIST21.ARC 130236 08-15-87 Teachers' grading program/jr/sr HS/college 2.1 U/L & written by Denis Latkowski. Not crippled, but there is a newer version that goes to registered users ($25) "which has been greatly rewritten" and has a sort option on printing the final grades. 123LRN22.ARC 44221 08-15-87 Generate Lotus macros automatically v2.2 U/L by Melvin Douglas. A macro learn facility (watches what you type) for Lotus 1-2-3 Rel 2.0 and up. SORTF223.ARC 5683 08-15-87 Buerg's excellent SORT replacement v2.23 08-15-87 Sorts on up to 16 key fields/very fast Two new options in this version: You can sort individual fields in reverse order, and you can produce an output file with the sort keys only. I won't bore you with a review raving about this program that would end up taking more time to read than to download the file -- if you haven't tried SORTF, you should! PROFIL.ARC 19477 08-15-87 Symbolic execution profiler v1.01 6/86 U/L by Eric Sass. There have been so many "profile" type programs I honestly can't remember whether this one was already on the system at some point. Anyway, this one is by John Navas II, v1.01 and looks like it was released about a year ago. Beyond that .... this kind of program is much too techie for lil' old me. DSZ0811X.ARC 40808 08-15-87 DSZ.EXE/no SHARE or buffer/faster at 19.2 08-15-87 8/11/87 version/most should use DSZ.COM This is the special version of DSZ for higher throughput at 19.2 bps and above. It's posted for the sake of completeness, but most of you will do better with DSZ0811.ARC, the Turbo C version which supports I/O buffering and takes less memory. ZCOMMEXE.ARC 137209 08-15-87 / Multi-protocol support/term emulatns 8/13/87 No new docs or help processor. And, no update notes. But, if you set the string variable "plog" to a file name (e.g. set plog c:\comm\plog), ZCOMM will now log detailed data about each transfer, similar to the new DSZLOG info (see DSZ0811.ARC description) but with even more data. RZSZ0815.ARC 63759 08-15-87 Unix Zmodem source 08-15-87 (rz 1.24/sz 1.34) The send zmodem program, sz, has been updated to implement tx backchannel garbage count and ZCRCW after ZRPOS in accordance with the 7/31/87 Zmodem protocol specs. Needless to say, I didn't come up with that mouthful by myself. There's actually an update note in SZ.C!!!! D86V309A.ARC 63095 08-14-87 \ D86 Debugger v3.09: Use w/A86 or alone D86V309B.ARC 54925 08-14-87 / Major update w/complete set of new docs U/L by Stephen Falatko. Looks like a lot of changes to "Howard Cosell's" debugger , this is, in fact, a very powerful assembly language programming tool, especially when used in conjunction with A86 by the same author. DSZ0811.ARC 48670 08-14-87 Forsberg's X/Y/Zmodem transfer module 8/11/87 08-14-87 New DSZLOG format w/more info incl error rate The new log gives total number of errors, flow restraints, and packet size info, all in addition to that which was already provided. The Zmodem -Y parm (send newer files only) now works as documented. When sending, DSZ displays on the local screen the size of the file being transferred. All in all, some nice touches. TSRDIAL.ARC 61440 08-14-87 TSR Phone & FAX dialer 11/1/86 w/QBasic source U/L Gray Maddry. The source should prove interesting. I didn't try the program. QDISK313.ARC 14711 08-14-87 Enhanced/TSR vrsn of PCMag DR (sweep) > 64K Adds some nice features to PC Mag's DR.COM, a nifty little sweep utility, and makes it a TSR. The problem is that the program swallows a whopping 64K of RAM. Chips may be cheap, but available memory -- at least on my machines -- isn't! TOOL-INC.ARC 74615 08-14-87 TPas INClude files written/used by Sam Smith 08-14-87 Some require TSHELL12.ARC / as of 8-13-87 An assortment of Turbo Pascal include files, you'll need some of them to re-compile NETARCV and NETCPY30. Some also must be processed first by TSHELL12, also by Sam Smith. Sam updates this "tools" arc almost as often as he updates PCBPro and I'll never be able to keep up with him, but here's the current set as of this morning (at around 11 am our time -- means there must be a new version by now!). SYSTEM34.ARC 14552 08-14-87 PC/AT System Analyzer v3.4 JJ Seither U/L by Jim Davis. COM file only. Gives the normal info about what's installed in your machine, plus some environment strings. CARSIGN.ARC 39613 08-14-87 Make "BABY ON BOARD" type signs w/computr U/L by Jim Davis. Written by Mustang Software, they've done better than this in the past. This is kind of silly, but I'll keep it on the board for a bit. "Baby on Board" is baby on bulletin board, right? Or is that motherboard? How about keyboard? TOPBRD.ARC 4992 08-14-87 Top BBS list 6/87: Excellent taste! (ahem) U/L by Barbara Beckham, and written by Jim Robeson, a caller here. He, uh, happens to mention this board rather favorably. There's some nice info about other boards as well. TCDEBUG.ARC 56358 08-13-87 Turbo C source debugger/Baldwin/v0.00 (test) U/L by Roger Jack. A first, test release of David Baldwin's Turbo C source debugger, this looks pretty powerful. The TPascal debugger by Baldwin is excellent, so the development of this program should be interesting to watch. PPEPS4.ARC 8037 08-13-87 Epson print drivers For AutoCad-2 (Rev 4 2/87) U/L by Craig Smith. Untested -- hardware and software unavailable. XMSAMPLE.ARC 28040 08-13-87 Xmodem/Ymodem checksum & CRC examples in C U/L by Richard Kinoshita. The code looks Lattice-y, but the general ideas are portable. TCOMM21.ARC 49483 08-13-87 LiteComm Comm Toolbox v2.1/Turbo C small model U/L by Richard Kinoshita. A very good set of routines for Turbo C, source code for the library is sent to registered users as is more info on implementing Xmodem family file transfers. WINFO.ARC 9421 08-13-87 [MS-Windows] Dump Windows Parameters Utility U/L by Cameron Caffee. WORDPAL1.ARC 89973 08-13-87 \ WORD PAL full-featured word proc \ EXE & DOC WORDPAL2.ARC 92507 08-13-87 / v1.3 7-8-87 w/mail-merge and / MAIL WORDPAL3.ARC 42948 08-13-87 \ spell checker (dictionary seems \ MERGE WORDPAL4.ARC 85227 08-13-87 / to be missing from these ARCs) / SPELL U/L by David Geerinck. This looks to be an easy to use, but quite powerful, word processor, complete with mail merge and a spell checker. The docs are less than wonderful, but the program puts its commands up on the top of your screen, depending on the context, and you can pretty well take it from there. As best I can tell, Epson printers are supported and not much else (other than a "generic" nothing fancy option). Note: The 4th archive apparently should have included a dictionary but does not. Yet, WORPAL.DIC is created when you run the program and the spelling checker does seem to work. More important, there is a brief mention in the manual that this is a trial version (use-limited) and an ascii string in the EXE saying "I don't work for free." No indication how many times the program can be used before it dies. It will not live long on this system under those circumstances. MLINK14.ARC 35726 08-12-87 Meiners' MegaLink protocol module v1.4 w/DOC U/L by Loren Olson. A module that can be used by BBS systems for adding Meiner's MegaLink protocol to their arsenal. This release supports "share"d files (networks) so could theoretically be put on-line here. I'll think about it, but at the moment, the program won't send batch as it's supposed to. If you give it the command line, MLINK PORT 1 SPEED 2400 SM C:\UP\FIRST.ARC C:\UP2\SECOND.ARC, it only sends the first file. Plus, when I tried to abort it on the receive side with a control-break, it put my computer to sleep (reboot time). In short, this module is getting there, but .... With this release, Meiners has added Forsberg's method of 32-bit CRC calculations. Now the question is: Is there any advantage to MegaLink over Zmodem? I don't see any from the protocol specs themselves and it's missing some very valuable Zmodem features, like the ability to resume an aborted transfer and the fact that Zmodem implementations are available for several operating systems, from DOS to Unix to VMS. Anyway, I'm open to feedback. BIOPATCH.ARC 5565 08-12-87 Patch AT&T DOS 3.2 to fix slow clock problem U/L by Ed Hopper. PNH.ARC 24569 08-12-87 PhoNe Handler:name/address/phone/dialer v1.0 U/L by Gray Maddry. I couldn't get the dialer to work (this always happens to me, so ignore it -- I'm all thumbs with communications programs -- but the name/address database, while simple, looked useful. NETCPY30.ARC 12305 08-12-87 Share compatible Unix-like COPY w/TPas v3.0 I really like this one. First, it's network compatible so it can be used safely on this system (yay!). Second, even for folks who don't care about file sharing, the Unix 'cp' command does something DOS' won't -- e.g. cp file1 file2 file3 c:\destdir. What you lose is the ability to concatenate files as that's done by a different utility in Unix (cat). By Sam Smith, author of PCBPro door. NETARCV.ARC 16701 08-12-87 Share compatible ARC Verbose dir w/TPas Also by Sam Smith, extracted from PCBPro, here are the ARCV routines he is using in that door. I wonder if Sam realized that Vern Buerg's ARCV (written in ASM and source is available) also supports SHARE? TSHELL12.ARC 93215 08-12-87 Turbo Pascal Preprocessor v1.2 Sam Smith A very powerful looking tool for Turbo Pascal programmers, this program is needed to compile NETCPY and NETARCV (and other programs written by Sam). TSHELL is a full-fledged environment to wrap around Turbo Pascal's compiler bringing to it some of the capabilities more commonly found in C pre-processors. UNBUND.ARC 9092 08-12-87 Unbundle Unix shell archives in DOS/Turbo C With Turbo C source included, another little gem from Sam Smith, this one will extract *most* Unix shar files (except those that rely on the Unix stream editor 'sed', the functions of which would be a lot less easy to imitate than cat, echo, etc.). Seems to convert the files to DOS format while it is at it -- that is, newlines become CR/LF, etc. TC-CRC.ARC 6288 08-12-87 Turbo C source for CRC calculations inc table Two ways of calculating CRC in Turbo C: the hard way and by table lookup. PMTOUCH.ARC 5570 08-11-87 Chg file date to now/paths/*.* w/ASM/A86 src Nicely done, just a quick and dirty "touch" util that takes both path and wildcard specs. Used with 'make' by C programmers, but useful for anyone who wants to change a file's date to the current system time and date. NAVIG2.ARC 76516 08-11-87 Celestial Navigation Aid for boaters,etc. 1.2 U/L by Ken Hunt. HDTST313.ARC 76736 08-11-87 Exhaustive test of HD for bad clusters v3.13 Very unclear what's changed in this release versus 3.12, HDTEST is a very through tester of your hard disk for bad clusters. But, it gives your disk a heck of a workout and takes a LOOOOONG time. Not something you'd want to run from AUTOEXEC.BAT on a daily basis! TREESURG.ARC 17982 08-11-87 Find/Compare/Delete/Rename dupe files 1.0 Scans the entire hard disk for files by the same name and then gives you the ability to COMP, REN, or DEL the dupes. I like QDUPS1-0 a little better, I think, but they're both competent programs. FBR161.ARC 14948 08-11-87 Buerg's File Backup /Restore v1.61 8/04/87 Update notes for this test version (Vern's still working on this one, making improvements all the time): 1.60 - Aug 1, 1987 - FB: add display of file count, total bytes, and count of disks required - FB: improve file selection routines 1.61 - Aug 4, 1987 - FS: add filespec command line option - FR: replace file selection routines - FR: correct abort if wrong disk mounted - FR: correct restore of file after replying Y to "already exitts" message NARC12.ARC 48050 08-11-87 Mouse/menu-driven point/shoot unarc util v1.2 U/L by Tom Drinkard. The major change is the claim that this version extracts files from archives up to 70% faster than the prior release. If you're looking for a menu or mouse driven arc browse/extract util, this one deserves a serious look. And, the doc is excellent, containing one of the best discussions available of the various compression algorithms used by archive utilities, including "squashing." NMAKE.ARC 52296 08-11-87 PD 'make' utility (MS-C 4.0 source & EXE) U/L by Tom Drinkard. Yet another one, this one for MS-C 4. L-BROKER.ARC 73537 08-10-87 Loan Broker v5.0 / Loan & interest calculator U/L by Tom Weyer. No doc, but there's sufficient info in the program. Looks like a fairly powerful financial calc utility, though we're not exactly short of programs of this genre. A caller to this BBS indicates there's a mistake in the TIL calcs in this program. GTCTL45.ARC 93945 08-10-87 GT PowerComm host mode utility v4.5 U/L by Raymond Wood. QBFIXJR.ARC 5641 08-10-87 Patch to run Quickbasic v3.0 on PCjr U/L by Mike Berscheid. SFM.ARC 67410 08-10-87 'Super File Manager' 1.0 Sweep/Undelete U/L by Neal Machtiger. Designed to look somewhat like Neidert's PC Filer, this one adds some Norton-like capabilities including an unerase (untested here). CCUR25.ARC 17706 08-10-87 Lundin's Counting Cursor (ruler) v2.5 8/8/87 U/L by Paul Gorski. Mr. Lundin seems to be on quite a roll lately with lots of revisions to this excellent program. The 2 separate versions for color/mono monitors have been combined into one, and various changes have been made to make it a better behaved TSR. CCUR can also be run from DOS. LASER.ARC 49615 08-10-87 Laser Master:TSR HPLaserjet font select util U/L by Melvin Douglas. Untested -- hardware unavailable. PCSTOCK.ARC 118780 08-10-87 Stock Tracking/Trends analysis v1.4 (1984) U/L by Melvin Douglas. This dates back to 1984, but has apparently been recompiled with Quick Basic 2.0. It's not bad as BBS-distributed stock analyzers go, but ... The sample price data included is way out of date. UNITCONV.ARC 43895 08-10-87 Universal unit measure conversions v1.3 U/L by Melvin Douglas. As soon as I can remember how many ounces are in a pint, then I'll consider whether I want to deal with conversions to other systems! SETTYPE.ARC 40610 08-10-87 Setup util for Epson-LQ printers/choose type U/L by Melvin Douglas. Untested -- hardware unavailable. PCD2.ARC 15940 08-10-87 Pop-up (non-res) directory change util v2.0 U/L by Charlie Slavin. Not great. ADD_BOOK.ARC 144052 08-10-87 Personal Address Book 1.1/Labels disabled U/L by Melvin Douglas. Clipper-compiled, so huge. Looks pretty functional but the author has crippled it's ability to print address labels to encourage registrations. ASMPOP.ARC 29341 08-09-87 TSR assembly language reference guide v1.05 U/L by Gerald Price. A pop-up helper for ASM programmers. BBSQRF.ARC 2947 08-09-87 TSR / Quick Reference for PCBoard BBSs U/L by Jim Robeson. I'm not persuaded that PCBoard is complicated enough to justify a TSR help util, but it's here if you want it. A fair amount of this will be wrong when PCBoard 12 is released any day/real soon now. NANNWS14.ARC 10366 08-09-87 Nantucket Newsletter #14 U/L by Bob Hicks. CLIPTC.ARC 1545 08-09-87 Use Turbo C with Clipper/R. Freeland 7/24/87 U/L by Bob Hicks. RZSZ0805.ARC 63303 08-09-87 Unix Zmodem source 08-05-87 (rz 1.24/sz 1.33) Update notes from Chuck Forsberg? Ya gotta be kidding (not really fair, actually, as DSZ.DOC has included some lately) . But, I noticed some bug fixes and the code now reflects the latest Zmodem specs. CASLBL20.ARC 48881 08-08-87 Audio cassette tape labeler for Epsons U/L by Melvin Douglas. PUBUTILS.ARC 24002 08-08-87 Convert MacPaint to PFS Personal Publisher U/L by Denis Latkowski. EBL308A.ARC 76825 08-08-87 SeaWare's Extended Batch Language v3.08a U/L by Lewis Paper. The complete BBS distribution package of this excellent batch language extension. There's even more if you register but what's here is complete and powerful. Update notes are included and the changes are significant enough to warrant an upgrade. ERRLVL11.ARC 11429 08-08-87 Print ERRORLEVEL of child process w/Lattice C U/L & written by Lewis Paper. 8/7/87 release adds support for DOS paths. TINYLST2.ARC 16937 08-08-87 Print file 2cols/condensed/subscript v2 /TPas U/L by Doug Hunt. Source included so you can customize for your printer if need be, STATUS2.ARC 9794 08-08-87 Disp Mother Bd Switches/Reg/Ext/Exp Mem PCM v2 U/L by Doug Hunt. A mod to PC Mag's motherboard switch display program, this one works fine on my clone that has no such switches! LARN12AS.ARC 232121 08-08-87 PC LARN v12: DOS adventure w/complete C source U/L by Rip Toren. Naw, this isn't a game, right? Kept for the C source. I took NDMAKE out of the arc as a newer version is here in its own file. This is by the author of that excellent 'make' utility and worth a look. VOL6N15.ARC 34861 08-08-87 PC Mag Vol 6 #15/ DIRNOTES/DOSKEY/KBTEST U/L by Mike Focke. These keep showing up before my copy of PC Mag arrives. Not fair! (9/1/87 Update: OK, by now my copy of PC Mag has arrived. DIRNOTES is a bit like XPANDIR and other similar programs for annotating your DIRs, but much simpler. DOSKEY is a very simple command editor). EM39ANSI.ARC 53508 08-08-87 MicroEmacs 3.9: Generic ANSI EXE U/L by David Page. For not-so-compatibles. Most others should use the EXE in EM39IBM.ARC PC-GL30A.ARC 50279 08-08-87 Medlin's General Ledger 3.0 (7/87 release) U/L by Loren Olson. The COM file is exactly 3 bytes different from the one that was already here, and both sign on as PC-GL v3.0. Yet, the author apparently sent this "updated" version to Compuserve, so ... CSAP208B.ARC 39381 08-08-87 Sort & Pack dirs/2.08b 7/30/87 Turbo C compact U/L by Bill Walsh. Ported from DataLite to Turbo C (compact model). INTERCEP.ARC 39051 08-08-87 Monitor DOS & BIOS calls of programs w/C U/L by Mike Rubenstein. Very powerful, very techie program, for you techies! DOCKET.ARC 11067 08-07-87 dBaseIII+ attorney's docket/suspense prgms U/L by Arnold Grant. Looks pretty good. A compiled version of this program is also on the system. CCONFIG.ARC 10491 08-07-87 Show characteristics of C compilers/Unix/DOS? U/L by Ken Brown, who reports no luck with this one under Turbo or MS-C. The info it provides on a Unix system is very valuable. FRACTAL3.ARC 11511 08-07-87 BYTE fractals for QBASIC3.0 U/L by David Cassidy. ZCOMMDOC.ARC 198967 08-06-87 \ Shareware subset of Pro-YAM/C.Forsberg ZCOMMEXE.ARC 136794 08-06-87 / Multi-protocol support/term emulatns 8/4/87 ZCOMMHLP.ARC 97711 08-06-87 \ Powerful/complex/X/Y/Z/WXmodem/Kermit/more I didn't see any update notes (but I could have missed them). Presumably, the changes in Zcomm reflect those made recently in DSZ. The Zcomm doc files are not light reading -- which may qualify as the understatement of the year -- but they constitute the reference manual for DSZ as well to the extent DSZ is an "irregular subset" (Chuck's glorious phrase) of Zcomm. ANS0887.ARC 7375 08-06-87 Report on the ANSForth Technical Comm. Mtg U/L by Jerry Shifrin. INTLEAVE.ARC 14458 08-06-87 Steve Gibson's Guide to HD Interleaving 5/87 U/L by Gene Pronko. This file kept making the rounds several months ago but without any documentation. Now, the docs are here and provide good info on interleave factors in hard disks. They also give a sales pitch for a product Gibson is selling to optimize the interleave on your hard disks without a low-lever format. As of this writing (9/1/87), that product is vaporware. BPRT200A.ARC 14240 08-06-87 Print files w/2 preceeding banner pp for ID U/L & written by Bill Madison. A good program for printing files (wildcard specs OK) with 2 preceeding banner pages to identify the file(s). STYLED17.ARC 118118 08-06-87 Text style analyzer v1.7 Good doc & examples U/L by Bill Madison. One of the better style analyzers on this system, this comes with lucid, humorous documentation, and some nice utils. XC3.ARC 28887 08-05-87 Xref for Turbo C w/source (compact model) U/L by Tom Drinkard. ZDF.ARC 3594 08-05-87 Displays free space on drive(s)/ASM/Hanlin U/L & written by Tom Hanlin. Tells you the amount of free space on the default drive if invoked with no drive specs, or will take multiple drive specs (e.g. ZDF c: d: e: f: ). ASM source included. ZD11.ARC 26624 08-05-87 'Zinger of a Dir List Util'/configurable/color U/L by Charles Bitterli. What a name! Oh well, it's fast, versatile and kind of pretty if you're into that stuff. TCWIND16.ARC 106606 08-05-87 Window routines for Turbo C 1.6 Daniel Evans U/L by Scott Pazur. It is astonishing how fast the BBS community has rallied around Borland's Turbo C and provided extremely useful add-ons to it. What does that tell other language publishers about pricing? Anyway, here's another TC LIB package to look at and perhaps add to your arsenal. GIZLIB11.ARC 85982 08-05-87 Misc QBasic 3.0 subroutines/field editor v1.1 U/L by Scott Pazur. Very good routines. See review of first release of GIZLIB for more info. YZMODEM.ARC 87545 08-05-87 Official Y & Zmodem protocol specs rev 8/4/87 The changes in the protocol docs are mostly for clarification, though the recent change to how Zmodem handles a CRC error near the end of a file is also documented. DSZ0802X.ARC 40448 08-05-87 DSZ.EXE/no SHARE or buffer/faster at 19.2 08-05-87 8/2/87 version/most should use DSZ.COM This is the so-called "special order" version of DSZ. Chuck decided to post it on his system. But, most of you will do better with DSZ.COM which has I/O buffering and takes less memory. DSZ.EXE, due to the use of a different compiler, is capable of greater maximum throughput, relevant only at 19.2 bps and up. NDP_TYPE.ARC 11264 08-05-87 Determine type of math coprocessor (ASM/EXE) U/L by Stephen Falatko. PCKERM20.ARC 33067 08-05-87 PCKermit v2.0, 19.2 bps & pop-up windows U/L & written by Jan Vandereyk. Already updated. See PCKERM21.ARC. TCOMM16.ARC 328704 08-05-87 TCOMM BBS system, shareware version 1.6 U/L & written by Jan Vandereyk. ASEASY30.ARC 139006 08-04-87 ASEASY v3.0 LOTUS 1-2-3 clone / no docs U/L by Loren Olson. Very limited documentation in the read.me file tells you just barely enough to load this program. There's also some on-line help. But, the full doc is only sent to registered users. ERRORLVL.ARC 10835 08-04-87 Print ERRORLEVEL of child process w/Lattice C U/L & written by Lewis Paper. CHECKVOL.ARC 10757 08-04-87 Rtrn ERRORLEVEL for wrong diskette/Lattice C U/L & written by Lewis Paper. GATEWAY2.ARC 7536 08-04-87 CTTY replcmt allows host scn/kb active v2 U/L by Jack Kilday. Reports are that this one works with multi-taskers like DoubleDOS et al. that have problems with CTTY itself. DSZ0802.ARC 47346 08-04-87 Forsberg's X/Y/Zmodem transfer module 8/2/87 08-04-87 Receive buffer now works; resets UART on exit The only change documented is that DSZ now resets the comm port's parity on exit. There are a few hints in the doc on using DSZ with ProComm's host mode. The docs also explain the deal on the "special order" version of DSZ first mentioned in the 8/1 version doc file: You may request that version when you register DSZ ($20). However, while faster (maximmum throughput of 1700 CPS -- good grief!), the cross-compiled version of DSZ takes more memory, does not support bufferred I/O or file sharing. MH08017B.ARC 143299 08-04-87 Don Mankin's MiniHost BBS system 08/01/87 U/L by Ted DeCastro. MiniHost now supports Zmodem via shells to DSZ. You all know what a fan I am of the Zmodem protocol so I consider this a *major* enhancement to an already very good mini-BBS package. DIRDAT12.ARC 39704 08-03-87 Log call dates in ProComm dialing dir v1.2 U/L & written by Bill Baer. CLEANTXT.ARC 34059 08-03-87 Remove ctrl chars/graphics frm text files 1.0 U/L by William Nadzam. BOYAN-D3.ARC 190975 08-02-87 Justin Boyan's excellent comm program v.D-3 08-02-87 Full docs, many protocols, & more 08/87 The update notes indicate Justin has fixed problems with the ANSI mode (no more flashing colors, I hope) and with use of external protocols. Those were exactly the 2 areas that needed a bit of attention. BOYAN is a very good comm program. It lacks some features I personally need (terminal emulation, for example), but it ranks among the best for BBS calling. Reports are that the Ymodem-G implementation needs work, especially at 9600 bps and up. DSZ0801.ARC 49178 08-02-87 Forsberg's X/Y/Zmodem transfer module 8/1/87 08-02-87 Receive buffer now works; takes < 66K RAM Three cheers! The receive buffer, which has been "fixed" in the last few versions, is fixed for real in this one. You can set how often DSZ both reads AND writes to disk by putting pBxxxx in your command line, where xxxx is the number of bytes (e.g. pB8192 for an 8K buffer). The docs also mention a special order version of DSZ compiled with a Xenix cross-compiler and capable of greater throughput (at the cost of more memory). I've asked Chuck for more info on that one and will post it here when/if available. PKEXE20.ARC 14792 08-02-87 PKEXE 2.0: enhances PKARC 3.5 self-xtrct util U/L by Bill Kelsey. US_CONS.ARC 46986 08-02-87 US Constitution: Full text / corrected versn U/L by Bill Kelsey. I think the "corrections" are not to the mistakes made by our Founding Fathers but rather to the accuracy of the transcription in another electronic edition of this that is making the rounds. I have *NOT* done a word-for-word compare to verify the claims! WDSPBIOS.ARC 3033 08-02-87 Details of the WD "super BIOS" w/autoconfig U/L by Jim Bready. DC-TEMPS.ARC 3577 08-02-87 Average annual monthly temperatures in DC/BAS U/L & written by Steve Hoglund. CRYPT2.ARC 11883 08-02-87 Encryption program; tutorial included v1.02 U/L by Steve Hoglund. And, yet another encrypt program. Do folks really have this much to hide? MODEMLOG.ARC 9086 08-02-87 Batch run modem use, log time/modify for yrslf U/L & created by Steve Hoglund. PASSKEY.ARC 4138 08-02-87 Create .COMs to stop action in BAT/wait key v1 U/L & written by Steve Hoglund (adapted from PC Mag's STOP.BAS). 5000.ARC 24706 08-02-87 Timed scroll of 5000 consecutive integers U/L & written by Steve Hoglund. SAYITRIT.ARC 40591 08-02-87 CBS News how-to-pronounce guide/simultd speech U/L by Steve Hoglund. COOLER10.ARC 24350 08-02-87 64K TSR help utl for Turbo Pascal v3.xx, v1.0 U/L by Bob Weinstein. FIXDZDOC.ARC 31738 08-02-87 Clean up DSZ.DOC file/removes backspaces & _s U/L by Bob Weinstein. DWC-A49.EXE 84992 08-02-87 Dean W. Cooper's DWC archiver rel A4.9;072187 U/L by Bob Weinstein. A not-ARC compatible archiver, DWC is quite fast, but ... SEA's ARC is the BBS standard. Check this one out for your own storage needs only. CODE.ARC 15114 08-02-87 Quick encode utility for text files v1.1 U/L by Ed Steinberg. A quick and dirty encoder, see TPL (whatever version is current by the time you read this) for a more complete, but cumbersome and time consuming, encryption package. DELINE.ARC 7808 08-02-87 Removes #LINE commands from C source file/EXE U/L by Bob Weinstein. REMOBACK.ARC 12079 08-02-87 Removes backspaces in text files;TP;R.Casey U/L by Gerhard Barth. GT-CISB.ARC 20580 08-02-87 Compuserve B protocol module for GT & others U/L by Vernon Huang. The module is generic, but the batch files are for GT. Contrary to the read.me, the TPas source is not included. RINGER10.ARC 18432 08-02-87 Activate BATch on 2nd phone call/start BBS 1.0 U/L & written by Vernon Huang. Useful for those of you who put a comm program in host mode and only want it to answer on the 2nd call. See also RNGBAK12. GALXY22C.ARC 172201 08-01-87 Galaxy editor v2.2C/WS-like w/pop-up menus U/L by Loren Olson. The changes from 2.2B look non-trivial. This is becoming a very good program. It's quite fast -- even if I'm skeptical of some of the benchmark tests included in the arc -- and would be a cinch for a WS user, or most anyone else, to learn this in a few minutes. It certainly doesn't have all the formatting capabilities of WS, but it's quite powerful and pleasant to use. LBAR42.ARC 49530 08-01-87 Quick menus fr dBase3+ v4.2;7/25/87;Freeland U/L by Gerhard Barth. REBOOTHD.ARC 2554 08-01-87 Auto Reboot till HD's up and on line w/ASM U/L & written by John Dove. Quite specialized, but if you have a hard disk in your system that's slow in waking up .... SAMPLGIF.ARC 30852 08-01-87 CIS Graphics Interchange Format samples/doc U/L by Don Doyle. QBX300A.ARC 53282 08-01-87 Buerg's QuickBASIC xref/lister v3.00a 6/21/87 In progress, but adds keywords for QuickBASIC v3, QBX is *THE* QuickBASIC XFEF utility. PLUG12.ARC 34803 08-01-87 Free-space defragmenter w/Lattice C v1.2 U/L by Larry Himes. Code modified to be more portable. TICKLE12.ARC 33448 08-01-87 Command line tickler/reminder system v1.2 U/L by Bill Harrington. Pretty simple, but that's really all you need for this kind of program. Command-line driven, which I happen to prefer, and it makes it suitable for batch file or P/CED usage to save keystrokes. DCBB0887.ARC 16636 08-01-87 200 + verified DC area IBM BBS #'s 8/87 U/L & compiled by Mike Focke, who clearly has not chosen measured telephone service to save money! DMP111.ARC 20338 08-01-87 Disk based print spooler (not RAM), ver 1.11 U/L by Gerald Chatlos. Includes a program missing from DMP110.ARC. Otherwise, the same. QBSCRGEN.ARC 85248 08-01-87 QuickBASIC Screen Generator w/BAS/No doc v1.02 U/L & written by Roy Barrow. Something of a demo for the QBTOOLS package. BB725.ARC 150036 08-01-87 BlackBeard editor/macros/windws/TSR opt/v7.25 U/L by Loren Olson. A very good editor with the option to run it as a TSR. Still *hate* the name. ====================== For reviews of files added to the system during July, download REVW0787.ARC. ======================