For years now, users of IBM PC and compatibles. Apple II's and othermachines have been able to use something called the Universal Hint System toread special "UHS" hint files that are available in the GEnie Games RTsoftware library. Hints are available for a number of games. And untilrecently, no Mac version of the hint reader was available. But times have changed, folks. Jason Strautman, who handles UHS support incat 1, topic 37 of the GEnie Games RT BBS as well as on CIS, has uploaded aHyperCard stack that reads UHS files! So we're no longer left out in thecold!HOWEVER...I experienced a minor problem in getting this stack to read theUHS files. When I first tried to read a UHS file, the UHS Stack told methat it, "Expected A Number." This was an obvious error message. I triedthis on numerous UHS files with the same results, and I thought I wouldn'tbe able to read any of the UHS files.Fortunately, I got curious and used Microsoft Word 4.0d to open one of theUHS files, which are ASCII text files. I noticed that there were extraneouscharacters (probably line feed characters) at the beginning of each line, asyou'll see in the following example, which is actually a portion of anexisting UHS file:UHS
STARFLIGHT
81
238
dGJrIyJrFFpI 3FzLry'
11
dGDpAtJpAFr kwIFBy'
17
dvHwIJpGJ gAErqJy'
21
dGJrIyJrFFpI 9pqry'
45...I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that because of the different ways thatMacs and other computers deal with text, some characters that are not aproblem for other machines are interfering with the Mac UHS Stack's abilityto read the UHS files as downloaded. Notice the rectangular boxes in frontof every line (except the first)? Well, after deleting all of them, I wasable to get the UHS Stack to read the files! All you have to do is thefollowing:1) Download any UHS file as you normally would2) Open the UHS file with a good word processor that has the global change(change all) capability.3) Select one of the extraneous characters. Then, paste the character intoyour change all dialog box and do whatever you need to do to activate thecommand. Your word processor should do the rest.4) OR...you can use a shareware utility called Add/Strip 2.8.9 to scan thefile for such characters and delete them. This is probably an easier way,if you have the utility.If you experience the same problem, the following procedure should enable toread any UHS file using the Mac UHS Stack.Gann MatsudaGEnie: G.MATSUDAINTERNET: iyi4dtn@mvs.oac.ucla.eduBITNET: IYI4DTN@UCLAMVS
