 
 
 
 
 
 
  HOW TO RUN ANY FILES WITH THE '.CRE' 
  EXTENDER DOWNLOADED FROM SIG*ATARI 
 
 
 
 
 
To help you get started, CRE files are necessary because Compuserve doesn't 
support transfer of anything other than regular ASCII characters. (Well, it 
does, but not in normal use.) Soon, we will have a program that will allow you 
to send/receive this special data, called an Exec. Until then, files that have 
control and inverse characters have to be altered to a format that can be 
transferred from/to Compuserve. 
 
A former SYSOP of SIG*ATARI named Bill Volk wrote a program originally called 
CREATO.ATR (hence- the name CREATOR), which has subsequently been modified and 
improved by many sig users. The 
most current version of this pgm is located in the XA3 database. 
 
When RUN, this BASIC program will generate a new pgm in LISTed ASCII format 
that will later be used to reCREate the source program you would otherwise be 
unable to transfer. 
 
Thus, a file ending with ".CRE" is an Atari BASIC program that when RUN writes 
the original file to your disk drive. It reCREates it, if you will. A problem 
arises if the CRE file will be larger than 12K bytes or so. Many Atari terminal 
programs have limited buffer sizes for downloading, and because of this 
wouldn't be able to download these programs. To solve this, a program will 
sometimes be broken up into several parts. Usually, these are notated in the XA 
by appending a letter to the file name. 
So, if a file is named TEST, and it has to be in four parts, it will usually be 
four pieces named "TESTA.CRE", "TESTB.CRE", "TESTC.CRE" and "TESTD.CRE". 
 
If a CRE file is in several parts, here's how you work it. ENTER the first file 
(in our example: ENTER"D:TESTA.CRE") and RUN it. Then for each of the remaining 
parts, type NEW to clear memory and then ENTER and RUN the next part. (The NEW 
is important! ENTER doesn't clear memory first like LOAD does.) 
 
In any case, you should have guessed that the CRE file must be ENTERED before 
it is RUN. The final file that a CRE file creates may be tokenized BASIC, 
listed BASIC, a binary load file, or even a data file with no special format. 
Check the description 
or accompanying documentation file to see how you should load the final file 
the CRE file creates. 
 
 
 
