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CONDOR.COM - Allows use of RBBS doors with PCBoard Ver 1.5 (C) Copyright 1987 Intermountain Softworks Please study documentation for proper use April 8, 1987 Intermountain Softworks is pleased to add a short but useful software product to the worldwide PC-standard inventory. Although CONDOR.COM will only interest PCBoard system operators running enhanced versions 11.8D/E under license, we are hopeful that BBS'ers everywhere will find more reasons to enjoy their local systems, and support them to the fullest. Written entirely in 8086 assembler, CONDOR will thoroughly convince 15.1A releases of RBBS-PC "doorware" they're running under RBBS. For suggested sources of these applications, refer to our resource list at the end of this document. Users are cordially invited to visit our own PCBoard system at 509/529-7229. Our maximum bit rate is 2400. We operate 24 hours on weekends, and between 1600h and 0600h weekdays, Pacific. Weekdays, the system is subject to availability after midnight. CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use 1.0 - Acknowledgements 2 1.1 - Limited License 3 1.2 - Overview 3 2.0 - Installation 6 2.1 - The MS-DOS Environment 6 2.2 - Disk Buffers 6 2.3 - Subdirectories 8 2.4 - Batch Files 9 2.5 - Possible Errors, Results 9 3.0 - Resources 10 3.1 - A Note for Door Developers 10 Appendix A - CONDOR Registration Request Form 11 1.0 - Acknowledgements PCBoard (C) 1985..1987 Clark Development Company, Inc. (Murray, UT) RBBS-PC (C) 1983..1987 D. Thomas Mack (Great Falls, VA) Microsoft, MS, and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Turbo Pascal is a registered trademark of Borland International, Inc. Within the context of this document, MS-DOS and PC-DOS are equivalent. Page 2 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use 1.1 - Limited License The CONDOR package, consisting of CONDOR.COM and this document, CONDOR.DOC, is the exclusive property of Intermountain Softworks, P. O. Box 2043, Walla Walla, WA 99362. The package may also include certain non-copyrighted sample data and/or batch files. Users are granted a limited license to copy and freely distribute copies of the CONDOR package, so long as the distributed copies are unmodified, the copyright notice is neither changed, removed, or bypassed, and that an unmodified copy of this documentation accompany the package. The preferred method of distribution is via one's bulletin board system. Except for the actual cost of disk media, mailer, and postage, or the normal BBS subscription fee, if any, such distribution must be without charge. Although Intermountain Softworks is satisfied that this product will perform as represented, and that due care has been exercised in development, CONDOR is offered on an "as-is" basis, without warranty, either express or implied. By use of this product, the user assumes all risk, to include responsibility for installation consistant with examples included in this document, and as promulgated by the developers of PCBoard. CONDOR is distributed under the shareware marketing tradition, on a "try-before-you-buy" basis. Users are encouraged to register individual copies for the modest sum of $10 per PCBoard installation. Registered users will receive one year's complementary access to our PCBoard system for thirty-five minutes per day, and access to all operating "doors." Registration also entitles one to technical support within the scope of CONDOR, via our PCBoard system. A registration form is included for your convenience. 1.2 - Overview RBBS-PC has come a very long way since the CPC-14 series releases. While we prefer the look and feel of PCBoard, that is not to suggest that RBBS-PC 15 isn't worth a serious look. Further comment on our part would be idle nit-picking. The system's evolution has altered doorware as well. Our humble utility allows single-node use of 15.1A doorware with PCBoard 11.8D/E. A network version of Condor is in the works, and should be available by Friday, April 24, 1987, if not sooner. You may download the latest version from us without validation, or other formality. Our program "Condor" is not a trademark, and we hope that the only entity who owns a vested interest in the name is a certain bird. Needless to say, we didn't ask the bird for permission to use his Page 3 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use name. Condor is a convenient six-character filename (to allow space for the revision level). It is sort of an acronym for CONvert DoOR. It doesn't convert anything, but merely translates PCBoard's exit file PCBOARD.SYS into a format that version 15xx doorware expects. Condor was originally written as a quick fix for our own problems in running "Tradewars" with PCBoard. At the time, we were not aware that doorware author Bob Westcott was making an attempt to support PCBoard SysOps with an MS-QuickBASIC effort called DOORCONV.EXE. We merely needed a small, fast utility that would do the necessary translation in a flash, and get out of the way. And, it needed enough flexibility to adapt to virtually any PCBoard subdirectory configuration. Let us not crow, however, over Condor's 1600+ bytes. The next release will probably increase that tenfold, to pick up floating- point math support (for elapsed time routines), and MS-DOS file- sharing support for true networks. At 40,000 bytes, Bob's effort already contains such support within the compiler's run-time module. It should be obvious that none of us is getting rich from BBS support applications and doors. Condor represents, by this time, far more hours of work than we imagined. The "work" is attempting to decipher what certain applications are doing, and what they expect, rather than writing brilliant code in assembler. If you wish to undertake this yourself (in lieu of our modest $10 fee), blessings and peace be upon you! The concept of a "door to MS-DOS" within BBS software probably originated with Tom Mack and Jon Martin as part of their RBBS-PC development. Tom writes of "horizontal growth" and adds that the term "doors" was coined to eliminate any confusion with MS-Windows. Doors are not even remotely like "Windows"; indeed, a door is little more than an exit from the BBS to a separate application, on the tenuous thread of an MS-DOS batch file. We suspect that Microsoft never intended batch files to be invoked remotely by BBS patrons. The vehicle, however, is provided with MS-DOS, and with careful planning and judicious use of support utilities, batch files are secure enough. A "conversion" utility like Condor shouldn't be necessary. Any programmer who spends all the time and trouble to write a door for either PCBoard or RBBS-PC may address both audiences with little additional effort. Ideally, a door configuration screen would ask under which system a user proposes to operate. Unless the door author has some political reason for limiting his product to one system or the other, the larger market potential in building flexible doors makes infinitely more sense. After all, shareware dollars are not that easy to find! Page 4 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use Condor reads in and parses the 128-byte PCBOARD.SYS file. It then writes a "messages" file in a format RBBS-PC doorware expects to find. This procedure also allows one to run doorware applications from any drive or subdirectory on the system. Half of the problem is now solved, that of passing currently- logged-user data to the door. The other half of the problem is that doorware also expects to find an RBBS-PC.DEF file within the current directory. Some of the doorware applications display one's system name on various screens. RBBS-PC.DEF provides that, limited to nineteen characters. If one wishes to walk through a doorware application from the local console, the messages file must be in a slightly different arrangement. We've included two sample messages files with variables set to allow this. Don't be alarmed if "Mike Davidson" is temporarily recognized as SysOp by the doorware application. The variables have absolutely no effect on PCBoard. Indeed, you'll want to set some of the variables within RBBS- PC.DEF to your own preferences or requirements. The only feasible way to do this is with CONFIG.EXE (version 30.1), available from us or from any of the four RBBS-PC systems in our resource list. Doorware applications are self-contained communications programs. Certain parameters like the bps rate MUST be passed to the door. Other parameters are optional. For example, if you wish to follow a PCBoard convention of seeing what the user sees if he or she chooses color graphics, option ten within CONFIG.EXE must be set to allow this. There is provision within the exit file, PCBOARD.SYS, to pass elapsed time (both as a four-byte single-precision real, and as a five-byte ASCII string) to a door application. There is an eight-byte ASCII string within the RBBS-PC node record (a part of the "messages" file). We could find no evidence that 15.1A doorware applications use time references from the main program. For the moment, time restrictions will have to be set directly within each door, or else by limiting the number of turns a player may use each session. Doorware instructions usually explain how to do this. Bob's MONITOR program will control time limits within individual doors. Lacking additional evidence, we may choose to have Condor write a TIMEOFF.DOR file, as does the monitor, and properly pass the elapsed time this way. Stay tuned! The result of all this is that use of RBBS-PC doorware applications is now possible with PCBoard 11.8D/E, with a minimum of fuss. The capability may well provide added interest for your users. One of our particular favorites is BBSLIST - a do-it-yourself database of BBS profiles, which allows callers to update a local Page 5 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use list, or search and sort to suit. TRADEWARS, a space-merchant trading game, a la Asimov's Foundation series, is clearly the most popular on our system. 2.0 - Installation CONDOR.COM installation on your PCBoard system (11.8D/E) is no more difficult than properly configuring a batch file and installing WATCHDOG. CONDOR's operation (that is, generation of the RBBS-PC messages file) may be tested off-line; indeed, even the operation of version 15.1A doorware applications may be inspected before committing oneself to callers. We strongly recommend, however, that you arrange to do a walk-through via modem - perhaps with a dedicated user - before leaving the system to run itself. 2.1 - The MS-DOS Environment As you may be aware, MS-DOS has the ability to find an executable file anywhere, provided you've told it where to look. The matter becomes an issue with some of the new doorware releases. Two filename references are written into RBBS-PC.DEF that concern you. One is the file RBBS uses to open a door (RCTTY.BAT, by default), and the other is the file to reinvoke the BBS. The PCBoard equivalent of these two files is DOOR.BAT and BOARD.BAT. If you try to change the defaults with CONFIG.EXE (which is the RBBS-PC.DEF editor), you'll find that only a drive specifier and a filename are permitted. Options 103 and 104 on screen [F6]. It turns out that some of the 15.1A doorware applications use this information. So, if you have config tell the door that the first file is C:DOOR.BAT, when in fact it is C:\PCB\DOOR.BAT, "MONITOR" (among others) won't be able to find it. MS-DOS, however, can find it for the application, if your "environment" statement within AUTOEXEC.BAT includes C:\PCB. Ours looks like this: path c:\dos;c:\util;c:\pcb The RBBS-PC.DEF file we've supplied uses PCBoard names for these files. 2.2 - Disk Buffers In the case of a CONFIG.SYS file which tells MS-DOS to trust one's judgment in a few matters, rather than reverting to defaults, most of us have safely specified FILES to equal some number, asked that MS-DOS install a RAMdisk, and have loaded the ANSI driver. Page 6 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use Common sense may suggest that the operating system simply reads information from a disk and passes it directly to an application. This is not the case. An interim holding area, called a disk buffer, gets it first. A disk buffer is a 512-byte block of memory that MS- DOS uses to temporarily hold information it is reading from, or writing to, a disk. If the buffered data will be used repeatedly, access time will be improved significantly if MS-DOS does not have to reread the same data each time it is needed. Users are given the responsibility of telling MS-DOS how many 512-byte disk buffers to allocate. This is done within CONFIG.SYS, and uses the syntax... BUFFERS = nn where nn is an integer between 1 and 99. Each buffer requested will increase the resident size of MS-DOS by 528 bytes. Some simple algorithm could doubtless be written to suggest the optimum number of buffers for a particular configuration. For a 20- megabyte hard disk, with the number of subdirectories that PCBoard requires, the magic number, we believe, is between 15 and 25. The ultimate authority may be a stopwatch. 15 will astound you if you've accepted the MS-DOS default of 2; indeed, PCBoard subdirectory searches will appear almost instantaneous. Page 7 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use 2.3 - Subdirectories Users should carefully review CDC's instructions for implementation of doors, contained within PCBOARD.DOC. The following paragraphs build on that knowledge. Assuming CDC's standard model for running one or more main board doors (conference doors are also possible), where subdirectories are arranged as shown below, we'll walk you through installation of the doorware application, BBSLIST. Drive C:\ (Root) | (Subdirectories) | +-----+------+------+---+--------------+ | | | | | Lotus WP dBase etc C:\PCB (Default) Sub Sub Sub | BOARD.BAT PCBOARD.EXE PCBOARD.DAT PCBOARD.SYS REMOTE.SYS Note: PCBTRAP.COM is normally EVENT.SYS installed via AUTOEXEC.BAT -> PCBTRAP.COM -> WATCHDG1.COM -> CONDOR.COM -> BBSLIST.BAT | (All below would be C:\PCB\+name) | +-------+------------+------------+-------+------------+-------+ | | | | | | | UP MAIN GEN HELP DOORS DL1 DL2 | | | | | | Files MSGS BLT HLPA BBSLIST.EXE Files Uploaded FSEC BLTG thru BBSLIST.* for to PWRD BLTxx HLPZ MESSAGES Down Main TCAN etc... DIR etc... RBBS-PC.DEF Load Board DOORS.DAT DIRG etc... DOORS DOORSG Page 8 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use 2.4 - Batch Files The contents of C:\PCB\BBSLIST.BAT should be as follows: echo off c:\pcb\condor pcboard.sys c:\pcb\doors\messages cd \ cd\pcb\doors bbslist.exe cd\pcb c:\pcb\board.bat Note our preferred use of fully-qualified pathnames. Some ill- behaved applications have been known to confuse MS-DOS, which normally remembers a batch file's subdirectory and last line executed. Calls to WATCHDOG may be safely removed, since no user intervention is allowed within the batch loop, and 15.1A doorware properly monitors the communications port for loss of carrier. WARNING: CDC's proprietary PCBTRAP.COM should be installed without fail for trapping attempted user breakouts, as well as fail-safe recovery from system errors that otherwise may abort to MS-DOS. Recall from CDC's discussion of C:\PCB\MAIN\DOORS.DAT, that this security file requires the ACTUAL filename of the door's primary batch file. If your door's controlling batch file were named BBSLIST.BAT, then that is the name that must appear within DOORS.DAT. Finally, observe CONDOR.COM's command line arguments. The first file specification is the input file, and ALWAYS calls PCBOARD.SYS. The second argument is the output file, MESSAGES. If you choose a different filename, the name must also be changed within RBBS-PC.DEF. 2.5 - Possible Errors, Results CONDOR.COM can and will generate error messages if it can't locate command-line filespecs you've supplied, or if your spelling is bad. All messages, including our copyright slug, are sent to the standard error device (local monitor), not over the modem. Errors result in a well-behaved abort to your calling batch file, not a crash. The fully-insured may wish to provide an IF EXIST test in the line following the call to CONDOR. This MS-DOS equivalent of "Are you there?" might then invoke BOARD.BAT if the expected files are missing. Our next release will provide exit-code support. Be warned, however, that if the RBBS-PC messages file is not written, or the doorware application cannot find either MESSAGES or RBBS-PC.DEF, that unpredictable results will occur. At worst, the Page 9 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use door will hang; at best, your caller will see some cryptic error messages and an instruction to "Press any key to return to system." CONDOR.COM will confirm a successful write of the required RBBS data as "RBBS data written" which appears within a moment or two of the copyright box. Execution then passes to the next line of the calling batch file. This may be the proper place to advise that error-trapping is not a fully-developed science within doorware. Indeed, we have witnessed occasional unrecoverable communications errors, most often when a caller is using a machine that simulates the 8250 UART chip. On such occasions, PCBTRAP.COM will reboot the system in an eyeblink. Doorware fortunately writes a file to the current directory called ERRORS.DOR, reporting what probably happened, in QB error messages. 3.0 - Resources The four major sources of RBBS-PC doorware are... 415-689-2090 CA Concord Jon Martin 4 Home of RBBS-PC West 701-293-5973 ND Fargo Loren Jones 4 Fargo PCUG,RBBS Beta 603-424-5497 NH Merrimack Bob Westcott 4 On-Line adventure,Ham 703-759-5049 VA Great Falls 703-759-9659 VA Great Falls Tom Mack 4 Home of RBBS-PC 3.1 - A Note for Door Developers PCBoard's exit file, PCBOARD.SYS has been extensively documented by David Terry and others. David's Turbo Pascal (tm) example is the standard reference. The following PCBoard system maintains a private conference on the subject of doors. A restricted-distribution door kit is available to PCBoard licensees. 201-729-7410 NJ Lake Mohawk Paul Kopit B 4 Software Soc'ty,140M Also, we attempt to stay abreast of essential utilities and tools for door applications programmers. Feel free to call our system during the hours indicated. Page 10 CONDOR.COM - Installation and Use Appendix A - CONDOR Registration Request Form SEND TO: Intermountain Softworks P. O. Box 2043 Walla Walla, WA 99362 Quan Item Price Total [ ] Diskettes $10:_____________________ [ ] Support $10:_____________________ Company P.O. +$ 5:_____________________ WA orders add 7.9%:_____________________ TOTAL (US dollars):_____________________ []Check []P.O. []Visa/MC Visa/MC #:______________________________ Exp. Date:______________________________ Signature:______________________________ SHIP ORDER / USER MAIL / BBS VALIDATION Name:___________________________________ Company:________________________________ Address:________________________________ City,St,Zip:____________________________ Business or Data Phone:_________________ Home Phone:_____________________________ Choice of BBS password:_________________ (Limit of 12 characters, one word please!) Registered users automatically receive complementary validation on our PCBoard system, which operates 24 hours weekends, and between 1600h and 0600h Monday through Friday. On weekdays, the system is subject to availability after midnight (Pacific). 509/529-7229 No parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit Bit rates: 2400, 1200, 300 Thank you! Page 11