^C^1Diskovery ^Cby ^CVal J. Golding VIEW FROM THE SOUTH ------------------- It's interesting how one's preconceived notions of surroundings and environment change with actual exposure. For example, we came to Shreveport from Seattle, by way of California. In the Northwest we had become accustomed to temperate summers and chilly, occasionally snowy, winters. Our ideas of the south were of year-round heat waves, high humidity and afternoon thundershowers. Our first trip here in late August found the expected conditions of high temperature and humidity, but surprise, the degree of physical discomfort was NOT as expected, and in fact, compared to the far east, was downright pleasant. What about the balmy winters? Here too, we should have known better. Within a month or so of our arrival, we found sub-freezing temperatures much like we had left behind in Seattle. As can be seen, one's subjective view is often far from accurate. FIRST THE NEWS... ----------------- If you are a new Big Blue Disk reader, it might therefore be a good time to examine what a disk magazine is and is not. In fact, we'd be willing to bet you thought it was pretty much like a printed magazine except designed to be viewed on a video screen. We hope instead that you have been pleasantly surprised, as were we on our first exposure. What is it then, that makes a disk magazine different? It is more than articles converted to text file form. It is more than a group of unrelated programs placed haphazardly on a disk. It is all these things and more. Big Blue Disk -- YOUR magazette -- is a gestalt; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Like many new products, we've gone through a stage of growing pains. We goofed when we thought we were compatible with every PC around. But we've also made amends; Big Blue Disk is guaranteed, so when we have found a problem, we've gone to work on it, the better to ply you with, says "Blue." Your mail tells us you enjoy Big Blue Disk, our sales tell us you enjoy it. But, gentle reader, we want to know what we can do so you will enjoy it more. Write! Somehow our little sermon above distracted us from the main topic: Big Blue Disk features you shouldn't miss this month. ...THEN THE VIEWS: ------------------ A couple of games are in this month's headlines, two from our growing collection which caught our fancy. Movie Mogul from the Chiang Brothers is an example of one we've "ported over" from our sister magazine Softdisk. This is one that we have spent a lot of time on, playing at home. Somehow it's a real challenge to try and top the record set by the last film you produced. We're not gonna tell you any details, but: we'll award a free one year's extension to your Big Blue Disk subscription to the three people who mail us a disk with the highest returns in these categories: greatest revenue, greatest profit and highest percentage returned. (Copy the file ^1HMMHS.DAT^0 from BIG BLUE DISK onto the disk you send; this file will contain the record of your scores after you have played Movie Mogul. Be sure to copy this file before you use the Reset High Scores option, since this will erase any previously-saved scores. Another thing: Don't try to cheat by editing the score file. We have ways of knowing when you have done this, and all such entries will be disqualified.) Deadline: May 31, 1987. Address your entries to: Movie Mogul Big Blue Disk P.O. Box 30008 Shreveport, LA 71130-0008. The other game is Superdots. This is the old-fashioned game of connect the dots on a grid and claim a square, but with a new twist made possible by the computer: there are a few invisible dots and some magic dots, all of which add challenge to the game. One special feature we want to mention is our Blue Plate Special, a Power Reading Demo from LSR Learning Associates. It certainly took us aback when we found out how low our comprehension was. Just incidentally, we have copies of the complete speed reading course available at discount prices for our subscribers and readers. See the flyer enclosed in the Big Blue Disk package. Sure wish we had room to tell you about every single game and feature in this issue, but then if we did that, what would we do with the table of contents? ...AND FINALLY THE BLUES: ------------------------- Over the introductory period for Big Blue Disk, as we indicated above, we found several areas where we didn't supply you with sufficient information to properly run Big Blue Disk. A lot of our mail has asked us things like how to copy Big Blue Disk to your hard drive. When you know how, it's a piece of cake, but it's our responsibility to fill you in. SHOWING OUR TRUE COLORS: ------------------------ For some users our menu colors are unreadable. Our disk checks your video adapter and tailors its display colors according to what it finds. Still, you may not think the colors are readable. So we have added an option to our disk. If you start BIG BLUE DISK by typing "GO M" instead of just "GO", then the menu colors will look good on a monochrome monitor, with any display adapter. In this mode, title graphics will not be displayed, but can still run programs which require graphics. Conversely, typing "GO C" will produce a colored display, but still will not let you display title graphics or run graphic programs if you do not have a CGA-compatible display adapter. These options will only affect how our menus and text are displayed; other programs on BIG BLUE DISK have their own systems for determining display colors, and will not generally be affected by the "M" and "C" options. In most cases, programs on BIG BLUE DISK are designed to look good on any kind of monitor. The "M" and "C" options are available on issues of BIG BLUE DISK starting with issue number 4. STOP THE SWAP: -------------- Randolph M. Cox of Normal IL has suggested a way to avoid the annoying disk swap when you run BIG BLUE DISK on single-drive systems. ^CAVOIDING THE NEED TO INSERT ^1COMMAND.COM ^CON SINGLE-DISK SYSTEMS Copy the file ^1COMMAND.COM^0 to a RAM-disk and tell DOS where to look. The procedure is as follows: 1. Use whichever RAMdisk software you have to create a small RAMdisk as drive C. I have found that the VDISK program that comes with DOS 3.x is much better than the one included with the IBM memory sidecard. If you only have 256K, make the drive just big enough to hold ^1COMMAND.COM^0. 2. Add the following commands to your ^1AUTOEXEC.BAT^0 file: ^1COPY A:COMMAND.COM C: ^1PATH C:\ ^1SET COMSPEC=C:\COMMAND.COM The Set command tells DOS where to look for ^1COMMAND.COM^0 and the Path command says to look on drive C: if a program is not found on the default drive. This is very helpful if you have more memory that you can allocate to the RAM-disk. I keep programs such as ^1label^0, ^1edlin^0, and ^1chkdsk^0 on my RAMdisk at most times. I hope that this procedure will make use of your PCjr more enjoyable. If you need a RAMdisk program, there is one called "MemBrain" for download on our BBS, SOFT FIDO, at (318) 636-4402. Caution: this scheme of changing the COMSPEC works properly only in DOS versions 3.0 and later. Also, if you create a RAMdisk on a 256K system, there might not be sufficient free memory to run all BIG BLUE DISK programs. DOING IT THE HARD (DISK) WAY ---------------------------- Several readers have been copying BIG BLUE DISK to their hard disks for faster access. This works for single-disk issues (such as numbers 1 and 2). However, double-disk issues pose a problem. The menu system still prompts you to "insert disk 2" (or disk 1) before it will let you continue, and then says it can't find the disk. Here is the fix: Edit the file ^1STATUS.DAT^0, which is on all issues of BIG BLUE DISK, and is used to tell which disk is in your drive. First, copy all files from both disks onto a single subdirectory of your hard disk. Ignore duplicate filenames. (Exception: Issue #4 had different files named ^1GO.BAT^0 on disks 1 and 2; the first one is needed to run BIG BLUE DISK while the second pertained to PC-WRITE. Don't place the contents of both disks of that issue onto the same subdirectory of your drive. We will try to avoid such conflicts in the future.) Then edit the ^1STATUS.DAT^0 file. Edit only the copy on your hard disk; leave the original disk alone. You can use any text editing program (such as the BlueLine editor on BIG BLUE DISK) to make the changes to the file. Find the line in ^1STATUS.DAT^0 with the month and year of the issue, like "March, 1987". The line after this contains the disk number, which will be either 1 or 2. Change this number to a zero (0). Then save the file. Now BIG BLUE DISK will not request disk swaps. If you get an error message saying the ^1STATUS.DAT^0 file has been corrupted, re-copy it from the original disk and try again; you probably made a mistake in editing it. (You DID keep the original intact, rather than making modifications directly to it, didn't you?)