Power Menu v1.0 Copyright (c) 1997, Jem E. Berkes bP Software bpsoft@bigfoot.com http://atc.nethosting.com/starlink/bp/ -------------------------------------- Power Menu was written in 100% assembly language, using the Borland Turbo Assembler. It is small, simple, fast, and uses very little memory (1.4 KB). If you like this freeware program, you might want to purchase a customized version and/or site license. This will let you use a version of Power Menu with your choice of colours, your choice of screen mode (such as an enhanced text mode with 30 rows) and anything else which is possible. Prices depend on what you would like customized. A site license IS REQUIRED to run this software on multiple PCs. See the bottom of this file for contact info. I know that when I want to try out a menu system or DOS Shell I start up the program immediately and take it for a test drive ... but PLEASE, read these short instructions first (exactly 2 pages printed out). Power Menu is a menu system for IBM PCs and 100% compatible sytems running at least DOS version 2. Unlike the popular DOS Shell program that came with DOS versions 4 and later, Power Menu will run on other DOS systems that are not genuine Microsoft products (e.g. Caldera OpenDOS / DR-DOS). Power menu is easy to set up and offers many advantages, particularly in the way of speed and memory usage. A colour-capable display card is required, and some knowledge (on the user's part) of the DOS system also helps a little! Power Menu's interface is very simple: a colourful textmode interface with a list of up to 255 menu items. When selected, a command will run and then you will return back to your current position in the menu. The menu system scrolls smoothly up or down (there is no choppy page up/down required). A lightbar will highlight the current selection and a counter in the corner of the screen will remind you which item number you are on (out of a total of x items). Your original screen mode is restored whenever you leave the menu. The real advantage of Power Menu becomes apparent when you execute a command from the menu system. Power Menu will run the command and will only keep a 1504 byte "stub" in memory. Power Menu does not use any annoying tricks such as creating temporary batch files. This makes it possible to run Power Menu on a network drive, where you do not always have write access. -------------------------------------- HOW TO GET IT WORKING: Create a file called PWRMENU.INI (or edit the supplied example file). Let's say that you want to make a menu item called "Wolfenstein 3D" which will run the Wolfenstein 3D game, whose executable file is located at the path "c:\games\wolf3d\wolf3d.exe". You would insert a line into PWRMENU.INI which reads exactly like this: {Wolfenstein 3D}c:\games\wolf3d\wolf3d.exe You can see that the format is {Menu item name}d:\path\filename.exe. Keep in mind that even though at the DOS prompt you can type "MEM", for the menu system you have to specify the full path, in this case c:\dos\mem.exe. One very important note is that you can not run batch files directly. Batch files are not real programs, but rather the special "programming language" of COMMAND.COM. So (for example), to run a batch file called TEST.BAT in the C:\BATS directory, this would be the entry in PWRMENU.INI: {Run a test batch file}c:\command.com /c c:\bats\test.bat Internal commands (DIR, COPY, MD, DEL, etc.) are also internal commands and must be run through COMMAND.COM using /C, i.e. c:\command.com /c dir An entire menu is simply made by putting together many such lines. You can have up to and including 255 entries. End the line after the } to make a do- nothing entry (e.g. a sub-heading). You can also insert comments into the INI file, which are ignored provided they don't start with the "{" character. Now make sure that PWRMENU.EXE and PWRMENU.INI are in the same directory. I have copied mine into C:\DOS, which is a directory that is in my system's PATH (this means that the files in C:\DOS can be called from any directory). To start up the menu, I just type PWRMENU. I can do this from anywhere in my system. Use the up and down arrow keys to move the lightbar throughout the menu. Then press ENTER to start up a selection or press Esc to exit the menu system. -------------------------------------- EXTRA STUFF: Power Menu will run under practically any system conditions. It only requires 66 KB of memory to start up and will shrink to 1504 bytes when you run a command. It includes a checksum mechanism which will usually catch a problem in the program, for example if it has been illegally modified or infected by a computer virus. So it's pretty safe and very stable. It is not possible to configure this freeware version of Power Menu in any great detail. But if you like this freeware version and would like to have a customized copy, you can get one for a small fee. Type PWRMENU /? at the DOS prompt for more information about obtaining a site license/customized version. Here are a few more important notes: - PWRMENU.INI must be less than 64 KB in length - The INI file must have the same name as the executable, i.e. if you rename PWRMENU.EXE to MENU.EXE, the initialization file must be named MENU.INI - The INI file must be in regular ASCII format. Lines must end with the conventional CR/LF (ASCII 13/10) combination - It is OK to shell out to DOS (by creating a {Command Prompt} menu item, for example), and edit the INI file. Power Menu always reloads the INI file. - If your command has extra parameters, a space must separate them from the command itself, i.e. C:\DOS\MEM.EXE /C - ERRORLEVELs returned by Power Menu are 0=OK, 1=Not enough memory, 2=INI file not found or incorrectly set up (e.g. too many entries), 3=Checksum failure. -------------------------------------- AUTHOR'S POSTAL ADDRESS (e-mail address is bpsoft@bigfoot.com) Jem E. Berkes 185 Waverley Street Winnipeg, Manitoba R3M 3K4 Canada