Are you a Mac+ owner (or a Mac with 128K roms) with the "Ancient Art
of War" program? Do you create a lot of custom scenarios? Do you have
those scenarios scattered among millions and millions of floppies? (All
due respects to Dr. Carl Sagan) If so, you are in luck! In this document is a way to store many, many scenarios on one 800K floppy.
When you create a battle in AAOW, the program generates several files
on the disk. A file called TITLES, which contains the names you give the scenarios and a cross reference to the other files, called "T0" through (I think) TB. This gives you 12-13 scenarious per disk. Each one of these little files only contains from .5 to 5 K of information. So, 13 files times 5K equals 65K. On a 400K disk, this leaves 335K wasted, and on an 800K, a whopping 735K! With this technique, you should be able to store 10-11 SETS of 12-13 scenarios EACH. (143 different scenarios)
This technique works with the way Finder 4.1 deals with HFS disks.
Anything stored in a folder on an HFS floppy will be ignored. This is how we can keep all those scenarios on the disk. Put the battles you
won't be using into folders, and keep the set you want to play with out
of any folders.
Example. You have a disk with Mideval battles, a disk with Ancient
Roman battles, and a disk with advanced nuclear combat (rumored to be in
the version 6.02E23 of AAOW)
Now, format a disk, from an HFS version of the finder (5.3 is current
as of this writing), format the disk double-sided. Create three folders
labeled: "Mideval battles," "Roman Battles," and "Nuclear Combat."
From the Mideval battles DISK, transfer the "TITLES" file and all of
the "T..." files to the Mideval Battles FOLDER on the other disk.
From the Roman Battles disk, transfer the TITLES file and all of the
T... files to the Roman Battles Folder.
Do the same for the Nuclear combat files.
On the new, 800K disk, you should have 3 folders, EACH of which has
these files: TITLES, T0, T1, T2.....
Now, if you start the AAOW disk, and put the new disk in the external
drive (you're still in the finder) and open its icon, you won't see
anything. AAOW won't be able to see anything on the disk either. To
play a set of games, enter an HFS Finder, drag EVERYTHING out of its
folder. The TITLES file, T0, T1 (you get the picture). When you want
to play a scenario in another folder, return the files currently out of
their folder back to their proper home.
You might want to keep a trimmed System file and an HFS Finder on
that disk. Just hold down the Command and Option keys and double click
on the HFS Finder. Do your dirty work with the folders, then hold down
the Command and Option Keys and double click on the AAOW program. If
you store a lot of scenarios on one disk, you may want to keep a record
of which one is in which folder (If you install MockWrite in your AAOW
system file, you'll have a handy little editor under the Apple Menu.
You can keep whatever notes in there)
If this little trick works for you, or if it doesn't, or if you
have a question or comment, please leave an EasyPlex to
