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Text File | 1992-05-25 | 25KB | 437 lines

Runner -- A Desktop Alternative Other Programs Mini-Run, Regions, Rpicname, Rconvert & Rpicsel Copyright (C) 1993 by Dave Thorson Version 1.61 November 18, 1993 This file describes Runner's companion programs and other support programs distributed with Runner or available when registering Runner. Some of these programs are disabled in one way or another, until you register Runner: REGIONS - all saves are disabled MINI-RUN - a lengthy delay will discourage you from using this day to day but you can see how it works and test compatability RPICSEL - all saves are disabled They are included in this form so you can try out most of their capabilities but still have incentive to pay the small shareware fee to have fully working programs! It's all documented in other places, but basically you need to send $10.00 US (or more, if you, like others, find the programs worth more than that!) to me: Dave Thorson 4040 East Flower Street <-- new address! Phoenix, AZ 85018 USA (602) 954-6033 On GEnie: MR.DAVE If you have already sent in your shareware registration for a previous version, no need to pay again unless you want to keep eniticing me to improve things.... Just call or write and I can give you the security code for the serial number already assigned to you. HOW TO GET WORKING COPIES OF THE PROGRAMS Once you register, I will send you a serial number and a special security code. Put the program RUNR_REG.PRG (Runner Registration program) in the same folder (directory) as the programs listed above -- this should be Runner's home directory, or, for floppy disk users, the disk you keep these programs on. DO NOT RUN THE RUNR_REG.PRG PROGRAM ON YOUR ORIGINAL RUNNER DISK. Any Runner disk for version 1.61 or higher may now be copied for others or placed on bulletin boards, but not if it contains "fixed" versions of Regions, Mini-Run, or other "protected" runner programs. Run the RUNR_REG.PRG program, and if you agree to the terms and conditions it describes, enter your serial number and security code as requested. RUNR_REG.PRG will then modify all protected programs to make them fully working versions AND to embed your serial number within them. This way, if I find a working copy on a bulletin board or shareware disk, I can trace it back to you and take legal action for your violating my copyright on these programs. Sneaky but effective, eh? Oh yes, the odds of breaking the code are less than 1 in a million... Should you ever need to remove your serial number from the programs, run RUNR_REG.PRG again and enter your serial number with a different code (letter-number-letter). You should test one of the programs to be certain they are now disabled. Enough of all this, what are these programs, anyway? $$ Mini-Run Mini-Run is a companion program callable only from within Runner. It is used to free more memory for larger programs. It works like this: 1. Runner determines which program to run 2. Runner tells GEM to call Mini-Run, and puts information about the program you wanted to run where Mini-Run can find it. 3. Runner exits from memory, and GEM loads Mini-Run 4. Mini-Run grabs the information Runner set up, the loads the program you requested based on this information. 5. Your program starts, you do what you need, and exit it. 6. Mini-Run resumes control and if you requested Hold Screen, it waits for a keypress or mouse click. 7. Mini-Run tells GEM to load Runner and exits. 8. Runner restarts. Of course there's more detail than that, but this sequence should give you a feel for what's going on. It's all transparent to you as a user unless the information passed to Mini-Run gets to be too long (Runner will warn you of this and let you change the command line). Mini-Run takes about an extra second to load on a hard drive, and then Runner must reload after Mini-Run exits, so there is some inconvenience. But, Mini-Run takes about 29K of memory where runner needs nearly 100K more than that if a background picture is loaded. Mini-Run MUST be copied to Runner's home directory. That's all there is to installing it. For floppy disk users, it might work best to put Mini-Run on each disk with a program that needs it, in a RUNNER directory. See SETUP.HLP for more information. Mini-Run can be called in several ways: 1. Press ESC. The words "MINI-RUN" appear in Runner's upper right corner, replacing the time/date display if it's on. The next program run will be run via Mini-Run, and the MINI- RUN indicator will be turned off. Press Esc some more to cycle through HOLD_SCR, MRUN/HLD, and back to normal (date/time or blank). 2. From the file selector, hold down Control when you select a program to run. Note: if you select a data file that should trigger an installed application, holding down Control will simply bypass the application and send the file to File View instead. Moral: You can't cause Mini-Run to be used for an installed application by using the Control key. Press Esc BEFORE going to the file selector if needed. 3. Within the Add/Change Dialog Box (you see this whenever you add or change a program) you can left-click on "Use Mini-Run" and then, whenever that program is run from Runner, Mini-Run will be used. You can do this for programs, installed applications, or data/document files that trigger installed applications. If Runner senses that Mini-Run is requested by ANY of the above, Mini-Run will be used. For example, if even though Spectrum 512 does not have the "Use Mini-Run" flag set in the Add/Change Dialog Box, if you press Esc before selecting it from a menu then Spectrum 512 will be loaded using Mini-Run. If you hold down Control when exiting an application run via Mini-Run, then Mini-Run will return control to the desktop instead of Runner (if you want to go from Mini-Run back to Runner but want to supress the loading of a background picture, be sure to hold down Control AFTER Runner begins loading). Also, if a program is run with Hold Screen enabled, you can exit directly to the desktop by pressing Esc instead of a mouse click or other key, bypassing the return to Runner. One design decision made for Mini-Run will cause a problem if you try to enter parameters for a program with characters above ASCII 224. These will be remapped into the lower-case character range. Someone please let me know if this is a problem, but I can't imagine a program expecting characters in that range, far above the range of normally printable characters! As a result of this, you can now pass lower case characters, intact, in your prarmeter strings (also known as command lines). $$ Regions Regions is callable only from Runner, and only when a background picture is loaded (Not true -- as of Runner version 1.60c you can use Regions without a picture! See STARTUP.HLP for more info). There is a lot of on-line help within Regions, so only the basics and obscure stuff are covered here. Regions lets you define rectangular areas or regions (hence, the catchy name!) on the screen. Within Runner, clicking within one of these regions causes almost any Runner function to happen. It's great for setting up a mouse-driven front-end to your applications, to make life even easier for you, your clients, your kids, or anyone else getting close to your system. Press Y to call Regions. REGIONS.TTP will be loaded from Runner's home directory (where Runner first found RUNNER.CFG or else the root directory of the drive Runner was loaded from -- see SETUP.HLP). Once the program is loaded, information from Runner is passed through memory to Regions. Regions has its own GEM menu bar. For help in Regions, press the Help key before selecting anything in the pull-down menus. Press it again to turn off help. Help is also turned off any time you select an item from a Regions menu. Regions displays the current background picture and lets you add or change up to 32 active screen regions for that picture. When you exit Regions (using the Save & Quit option), all changes are updated in Runner's memory and Regions exits. No disk access at all (nice, eh?) and your changes are all active within Runner, until you exit Runner or load in another picture. To make your changes more permanent, you must save them in a picture configuration file. Use Runner's pull-down menu option File, Save Config to save both picture and Runner config files, or hold down Control when you select Save Config to save ONLY the picture config file. (You can also press S or Control/S, respectively). See SETUP.HLP for information on picture configuration files. Since screen region information is saved in a picture configuration file, you can have different screen regions for each picture. The idea is that you could create a background picture with "pseudo icons", pieces of a picture that act as icons but are really just pixels in the picture. You might have different disk drive icons, one for exiting Runner, one or more for your favorite programs. You can turn off Runner's menus and use nothing but screen regions to control Runner, if you prefer. You could dress up your game disks by showing a picture of each game that would be clicked on to start the game, or create a custom desktop with your own icon shapes to control your Atari system. Of course these are not "real" icons; you cannot drag them around on the desktop. To change them, you must change your picture in a paint program, then update where the screen regions are defined to match the new picture, using the Regions program. More complex than dragging an icon on the desktop, but perhaps more fun and gratifying as well. $$ Screen regions are created using the Add option. You can define and adjust a rectangular region anywhere on the screen. Then you need to assign a function to the region. Five types of functions are currently available: 1. Menu Bar functions or those available from Runner's GEM menu bar. About, Save, Load, Install, Add, Drop, colors, and so on, can be assigned to a spot on the screen. 2. File Selector functions provide control of the file selector, just like the Space bar and Alt-letter keys. Display a file selector for the last drive you visited, or start at the root directory of any active drive. 3. QuickKeys can assigned to any region, so that anything a QuickKey can do (run a program, display a menu, show a text file, etc.) can be done from a screen region as well. 4. Load Picture functions let you pick a picture file name using a file selector, and assign it to a shifted number key. It is also assigned to a screen region. Even if the region is later dropped, the name can remain assigned to the shifted number key. 5. Miscellaneous functions cover most of the remaining keyboard- only types of Runner commands, such as changing date format, exit via Undo key, menus on/off, Help, and so on.... A Change option lets you alter anything about a region, including its priority. If one or more regions or menus overlap, the one with the highest priority will be selected. Runner's menus have highest priority, then screen regions. Think of the regions as being in sequence on a list; those first in the list have a higher priority than those at the end. A region may be moved to first or last place, moving other regions down or up as needed. It's possible to have a region completely surrounded by another; as long as it has a higher priority it can still be selected and clicking in the surrounding region will activate its function instead. Regions also has the capability to save the current palette into a selected picture file. Ideally, you should only save the palette to the file whose picture is displayed! This option lets you take a palette changed within Runner, and update a picture file so it will have the same palette. Normally, Runner only saves altered palette information in picture configuration files. Additional menu options let you load in other pictures or picture configuration files (Regions will even translate picture config files from other screen resolutions to the current one), and you can also save picture config files. These options give you a lot of flexibility for copying a setup from one picture to others, so you can use the same regions for a picture translated across different screen resoultions or use the same colors and regions across lots of pictures for a standardized, mouse-driven menu system. $$ One other point should be made about the Regions program: it offers a lockout feature for Runner. This is intended for use in making demos or custom applications where you don't the user to have access to anything else. When lockout is selected, Runner's GEM menu bar goes away; selecting Exit Runner does nothing; the keyboard is ignored (mostly -- see below); the QuickKeys menu cannot be displayed; and anything else with potential danger is disabled. Lockout takes effect only AFTER changes have been saved from Regions to Runner, and from Runner to a picture config file, and that picture is loaded into Runner. Otherwise you would be unable to save changes from Runner! Turning lockout OFF in Regions takes place immediately on return to Runner. One problem: how do you get to Regions to disable lockout if the keys (including the Y key which starts Regions) are disabled? A not-too-elegant solution: Runner watches for a sequence of keystrokes, namely Esc-y-Esc (three keys, no hyphens, and no shift on the y). This is hard to hit at random and not too hard to remember. You can prevent use of Regions for sure by simply removing it from Runner's home directory when it's not needed, or by renaming it to REGIONS.TTX or some name other than REGIONS.TTP. Since lockout removes the GEM menu bar and Runner's menus, you can create a nice looking custom desktop. The menu bar area is not available for screen regions but you can put anything else in your picture up there. Even a Macintosh logo (now wait a minute, let's not get carried away here). All functions in Runner should be available through screen regions, including displaying sub menus and calling the file selector, but you can pick and choose the ones you need. If something's not there, let me know! I can see uses for locked pictures in disk menus, tutorials where selecting an item on the screen displays a text file describing it, starts a program to animate it, or branches to another picture with all different regions to show more (or different) levels of detail. You could simulate a large-than- screen-size picture by setting up regions at the edges and corners which load a new picture of the view in that direction. You could even program a simple (or complex) maze, or a walk- through of a house plan showing the view from any direction. Some of this is limited only by disk space for all the pictures, but you could always change disks before moving to a new picture. Just be sure the picture's config file accompanies the picture. And if you need a different set of Runner menus, create what you need and name it after the picture file (if STUFF.PI1 is the picture, then STUFF.CF1 is its config file and STUFF.CFG will be loaded as Runner's config file if it's in Runner's home directory). Have fun with it! $$ An example picture file demonstrating the use of Regions is included for low, medium and high resolution. Use Background from Runner's File menu to load REGIONS1.PC1, .PC2 or .PC3 and the corresponding REGIONS1.CF1, .CF2 or .CF3 file will load with it (if it's in the same directory as the picture). Without the Regions program you cannot change anything, but you can click on the various "icons" to see what they do. The Runner key equivalent letter for each icon is shown next to it. If you have the Regions program you can call Regions to edit the functions or locations of regions in this file, using the REGIONS1 picture as a training ground. [Note: as of Runner version 1.60, the recommended short-cut keys to access the file selector for various disk drives are the alt-letter keys, such as Alt-A for drive A:, Alt-B for drive B:, etc. Older versions of Runner (and 1.60b, maybe even newer versions) allowed Shift-1 to access drive A:, Shift-2 for drive B:, and so on.] $$ Rconvert This program is provided as an aid to prior users of Runner. It converts Runner configuration files (not picture configuration files) from older formats to the newest one. All information from older config files can be translated, except for installed application information. Rconvert will, if you select the appropriate dialog box choices, send a list of all your installed applications to a disk file with a name similar to your config file's name. Use this list to help you set up your applications in the new version of Runner (sorry, but the new approach to installing applications is just no longer compatible with the older information, and the potential for inconsistent results through an automated translation is just too high). Rconvert is easy to use, and it need not be in any particular directory. Run it by double clicking on RCONVERT.PRG. You can then remove the disk with RCONVERT.PRG on it and insert any others with .CFG files that need updating. Follow the prompts; it's easy to use and quick! You should be able to convert all your old .CFG files in a matter of minutes, and then you won't need RCONVERT.PRG any more.... Config files did not change formats between Runner versions 1.5x and 1.61. Run Rconvert for more info! $$ Rpicname RPICNAME.PRG is a program that lets you quickly change default (startup) picture files for Runner. Runner now looks at the size of picture files, and if a file is less than 100 bytes (or was it 128?) then it assumes the picture file contains a filename for another picture file instead of picture data. Runner also looks for RUNNER.PI1, RUNNER.PI2 and RUNNER.PI3 (or the .PCx equivalents for compressed pictures) at startup to use as autoloading picture files. Rpicname ties these two concepts together. Run Rpicname by double clicking on RPICNAME.PRG (you can also put this one into a Runner menu, if you like). Once it's loaded you can take out that disk and put in another if you need to. Rpicname displays a file selector. Simply click on any picture file you want to use at startup, and Rpicname will put its filename and path into RUNNER.PIx for you (x is 1, 2 or 3, and is taken from the file extension of the picture file you select). You can select files for any resolution in the same session. If you did not select picture files from Runner's home directory, be sure to copy the resulting RUNNER.PIx file(s) into the home directory. And be careful not to copy a name file over a real picture file (check the file sizes). Rpicname works best if all the pictures you select from are in Runner's home directory. Rpicname assumes you want to use RUNNER.PIx for holding picture filenames instead of pictures. If it tries to update a RUNNER.PIx file and finds it longer than 128 (or was it 100?) bytes, it will warn you and stop the update. This way you cannot lose any picture files. If you only use one picture for each resolution and never plan to change, then you won't need Rpicname. Otherwise it can be a very handy way to change the pictures you see on startup without a lot of renaming and copying of picture files. $$ Rpicsel Rpicsel (short for Runner picture selector) lets you create a list of pictures you like as background pics. Runner selects one picture from the list at random each time it starts up. Rpicsel lets you add to or delete from picture lists. One list is used for each screen resoultion. Runner can load in a picture list when it starts just like it loads in a single picture. A simple and effective way to avoid the monotony of looking at the same desktop all the time! The only confusing thing about using RPICSEL.PRG (because it's different than most programs) is that it gives you the options of load/add and save, and when you select load/add you can specify a single picture, a list of pictures, or a wildcard filename (like C:\RUNNER\*.PI3) to load bunches of pictures into the list at once. Rpicsel is smart enough to figure it all out for you. No menu full of Load, Add, Replace, Update or other commands, and no need to specify what type of file you're loading. Why aren't more programs written this way??? The only donwside is that you can only create lists for a given screen resolution while your system is in that resolution. More help is available within RPICSEL.PRG. [end of OTHERS.HLP]