Cream of the Crop 2

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Text File | 1993-10-19 | 17KB | 324 lines

Cream of the Crop II distributed by: Terry Blount Voice - 205-824-2552 BBS - 205-824-2611 Fidonet - 1:3625/441 P.O. Box 36, Bayou La Batre Alabama, 36509 ************************ IMPORTANT NOTICE ************************ "Shareware" is a concept where you have an opportunity to try a software program before you buy it. Shareware is comparable to commercial software in quality, but not usually in price. Shareware is normally much less expensive because the author has not spent the many thousands, even millions, of dollars on advertising that commercial software companies do. Thus, the overhead is much less and your cost reflects this. If you use a shareware program for a reasonable period of time you are required to register it. Please honor the author's registration fee and register the programs you use. Many shareware programs on this cd required hundred's of hours to develop. Many of the programs you will be using were written by authors who fully depend on the support of honest users to continue making software affordable. Your registration does count! ...not only to the author and his/her family, but also when you register there are usually many benefits that become available to you. Thank you for purchasing Cream of the Crop II. There are two major differences between this disc and the first Cream of the Crop. This cd was made with a strong effort to include ONLY new files. Only a few files older than April 93 were included on this disc. The dates of files inside the archives were checked and if there were any files older than January 1, 1993 the entire archive was deleted. There were a few exceptions because some programs still use the original setup program from an earlier release and some stand alone data bases need Brun45 to run. The second major change and probably the change you will notice first is the use of extended file descriptions. Everyone likes more information about the files but the programming challenges and memory requirements to include more information and maintain reasonable speed are significant. The view and retrieval program "Cream.exe" has undergone major upgrades and a dozen or so new features have been added. CREAM.exe This is a view and retrieval program that will assist you in viewing and retrieving the files on this disk, along with their size, date, and description. To run this program, simply type "Cream" and press enter. There is no setup required. Cream.exe is in the directory with this file you are reading now. You can exit Cream.exe at any time by pressing your escape key. Cream.exe is NOT for use for any purpose outside this cd. Please do not place it on a BBS. Features and notes on Cream.exe: a. This version is mouse aware. Most commands and features can be used with a mouse. You can make selections from any menu and when you are viewing a file listing you can place the cursor on the left scroll bar and click once to jump to that position in the listing. b. You can mark up to 13 files to copy or uncompress at once from a single area to a specific target directory on your hard drive. You can mark the files with the space bar or + key or click your mouse twice. When you press enter you will be prompted to type the target directory to copy or uncompress the tagged files. c. When you are viewing an area you can press the first letter of the name of the files you want to view and jump to that position in the listing immediately. This feature also works as a file search utility. After you press the first letter the next letter you press will go to the second character of the file name... etc. If there is no match or you press your tab key you will clear the buffer and begin a new search. d. If you press enter when there are no files tagged you will have additional options available. One of these options is a key word search in the file description field. This function is intuitive. Just enter the word(s) you want to locate in the descriptions and each line with the occurrence of the word will be marked with an asterisk (*) in column #23. You may repeat this process several time or clear your markers and start over. This search is not case sensitive. e. While you are viewing the opening index of the file categories you will have the option to load the entire listing and browse an alphabetized listing of all files or search for a specific file name. This feature will also load as much of the file description as the memory available on your system will allow. Because this option loads the entire listing of every file on the cd and a large portion of the description into memory this option may take a few moments on slower rom drives. However, when the list is loaded the search features are almost instant. While the list is being loaded you can see the progress each time 100 more files listings are loaded into memory. Notes on File Compression The programs on this cd are compressed with Pkzip from Pkware Inc. If you use Pkware for any purpose other than the one provided to extract files from this cd from within Cream.exe you are required to register your own copy. The programs on this and other shareware cd discs are compressed in order to save space and keep all the necessary support files together with the program that needs them to run. Compression also makes it possible to include the same amount of data that would require 3 or 4 cds in an uncompressed format. Many authors do not allow their programs to be distributed under the shareware concept if they are not compressed - without the distributor paying a fee for each disc distributed. This is because they know that it is unlikely they will ever receive any registration from programs that are distributed in a format that is already set up and ready to run. Please support the shareware concept and register the programs that you use. An Extra Feature! The files on this cd include the description inside the ZIP comment. You can simply run Pkunzip -v <filename> to read the description of any file. A Word of Caution All risks involved with using the programs on this cd are assumed by you alone. Some programs on this cd, especially those that manipulate the data on your hard drive, (ie. optimizers and low level disk management) can potentially cause loss of data. Be careful! Reading the docs and taking serious the warnings is the only reasonable thing to do. The following groups of files were not included on this disc: Commercial programs that are not released under the shareware concept, files that were older than April 93, sexually explicit (adult) programs and text, newsletters (except for a few that contained programming code), magazines, pictures (gifs, fli, animation, fracturals, graphics, clipart, fonts, images, cartoons, ext), music (Cmf, Mid, Mod, Mus, Rol, Voc, Wav, etc.), bbs door games, windows games, windows icons, Macintosh & Unix operating system support programs, demos, ham radio, BBS Support Programs If you run a Maximus, Proboard, Remote Access, Quick BBS, PcBoard, or Spitfire BBS one of the following programs will automatically set up this disk for your bbs file database structure in only a few minutes. ALL of these programs will AUTOMATICALLY copy (and correctly format) the Files.bbs from this cd to suit the structure of your bbs and increment the file names, placing the "Files.<x>" ( or File<XX>.bbs in some cases) into the directory you specify. Please backup your file data base before you run any of these programs. For an extra precaution, you can copy your file databases to a temporary directory and use your temporary directory to set up this disk. If the setup is satisfactory when you view it with your BBS management program (or text editor) then you can copy it to your BBS home directory. These programs are NOT to be used outside the scope of this cd rom disk. Please do not place them for download on a bbs. MX_Cream.exe This is the program to set up Maximus BBS. Actually it builds your "Filearea.ctl" control file then you can run FB to compile the changes. It is important that your Filearea.ctl be correctly formatted so that the last area can be located to provide accurate file naming when the Files.bbs are reformatted and copied to your fixed media path. "Area <X>" MUST begin on column #1 at least for the last record in your Filearea.ctl control file. Sorry only numeric incrimination is supported. (ie. The format: Area A, Area B, Area C, etc is NOT supported.) This program has several added options that will be obvious to you when you run it. You may want to read the section of your docs that explains the advantages and disadvantages of including the file size and date column before you execute this program and have to make that decision. SF_Cream.exe This is the program to set up Spitfire BBS. You will need to know the path to your Sffarea.dat file and your display directory where "Sffiles.<x>" will be placed, before you run this program. The extended descriptions will be automatically formatted with the #2 control character for Spitfire when the Sffiles.<x> are being created in your display directory. QB_Cream.exe This is the program to set up Quick BBS. You will need to know the path to your Filecfg.dat and your "File list" path directory before you run this program. When you use this program you will be given an option to override the default and select a different record number to begin setting up this disc. This option is dangerous if you do not understand its purpose. If you have a empty record in your file data base (the area name description field is keyed on to determine an empty record) QB_Cream will will find it first and assume that it has reached the end of your file settings. This record number will be the default setting used to begin setting up this cd. You should know the record number that is your highest file area setting to verify (and correct if necessary) the default setting. This option to use your own default setting to begin the setup of this cd is also useful if you wish to _insert_ this cd in place of one you are removing. The cd you are removing _MUST_ have used at least 27 file areas in order that sufficient space be available to insert the 27 file areas on this disc without overwriting the next cd's file directory records. If all this is unclear to you it would be a good idea to call 205-824-2552 for support. RA_Cream.exe This is the program to set up Remote Access version 2.0 or later. You will need to know the path to your Files.ra and your "Alternative file list path for read-only media" path before you run this program. When you use this program you will be given an option to override the default and select a different record number to begin setting up this disc. This option is dangerous if you do not understand its purpose. If you have a empty record in your file data base (the area name description field is keyed on to determine an empty record) RA_Cream will will find it first and assume that it has reached the end of your file settings. This record number will be the default setting used to begin setting up this cd. You should know the record number that is your highest file area setting to verify (and correct if necessary) the default setting. This option to use your own default setting to begin the setup of this cd is also useful if you wish to _insert_ this cd in place of one you are removing. The cd you are removing _MUST_ have used at least 27 file areas in order that sufficient space be available to insert the 27 file areas on this disc without overwriting the next cd's file directory records. If all this is unclear to you it would be a good idea to call 205-824-2552 for support. PC_Cream.exe This is a simple program to _assist_ the setup of Pcboard BBS. PC_Cream will copy the Files.bbs file listings to the directory of your choice on your hard drive * AND * increment the file listing names, ie. Dir1, Dir2, Dir3 etc. The extended description portion of the file descriptions will be correctly formatted for Pcboard format. The listing of the file area descriptions is included (under the name DIR) in this directory. PB_Cream.exe This is the program to set up a Proboard BBS. You will need to know the path to your FileCfg.pro and the path to your "listing file" directory. Since Proboard (and the structure for FileCfg.pro) is written C and this program is written in Pascal it is not easy to determine how many file areas you currently have setup. If you are currently incrementing your file listings in the File<x>.bbs naming format you should set up a separate directory for this program to place the file listings for Cream of the Crop II. The file listings will be named File1.bbs, File2.bbs, File3.bbs etc. and the corresponding path and names of these files will be written to your FileCfg.pro. Remember to run "Pbutil FI" when you finish to reindex your file base. Notes on File Category Classifications: Files were cataloged under the following 27 categories: BATCH C_LANG KEYBOARD SCIENCE BBS DATABASE LAN SCREEN BUSINESS DIAG OS2 SOUND CAD DISK PASCAL UTILITY CLIPPER EDITOR PRINTER VIRUS COMM EDUCATE PROGRAM WINDOWS COMPRESS GAMES RELIGION For the most part these directory names explain the kinds of files that would be cataloged in them. Here are a few additional notes about some of the areas: BBS - ONLY a few utilities that are specific for a single bbs program were included. Programs that support network mail transfer and programs that manage cd rom drives were included. BUSINESS - Spread sheets, Lotus, Quattro support programs, tax calculation, payroll... anything dealing with money. DATABASE - Genealogy, zipcode, phone numbers, and other databases, Dbase III & IV and Foxpro support, collector's databases, etc. DISK - Menu programs for disk management, including tape backup. EDITOR - Text editors, support for WordPerfect, spelling, tips and templates. EDUCATE - Educational programs including some text information files. KEYBOARD - Keyboard, mouse and other input device support programs. LAN - Every thing dealing with networking. Novel, Lantastic etc. SCIENCE - Science, math, measurement conversion, and engineering. UTILITY - DOS replacement utilities and security encryption programs. For Shareware Authors If you are a programmer who would like to have your programs included on future releases of Cream of the Crop you can mail them to the address below on a floppy disk or upload them to the bbs number listed at the beginning of this doc. This will insure that the latest versions of your unmodified programs are distributed. Final Notes The files on this cd have been scanned for known viruses. All possible efforts were made to prevent commercial software from accidentally getting included on this disc. If you detect a virus or a program that is not released under the shareware concept, please report your finding to Terry Blount at 205-824-255 or P.O. Box 36, Bayou La Batre, Al. 36509 Thank You.