         Some Quirks with and How Tos for this Qmodem Tradewars Script
                              By Tim Stewart

This Script all started with the idea of how neat it would be to have a 
script file for Qmodem that would allow one member of our corporation to 
EMail the rest of the corp without going through the hassle of sending the  
message three to five times. Dave Ballew with much profanity and patience 
then came up with the routines to EMail and rewrite the corporate datafiles.
At the time he also made routines to track paired ports and such using text
files made by TW View v.95. Close, but not quite right. Then came the script 
included with Tradewars Assistant version 1.1 by Albin Gershin. This allowed  
to run TW Assistant online and seriously improved our online capabilities. 
This script also had it's bugs so I set to the task of bringing the best 
features of both scripts together with some of my own ideas. I sent a smaller
version of this to the authors of both TW Assistant and TW Explorer. Albin 
never bothered to write back, but Paul Gibbons really liked it and suggested 
setting it up for users to be able to play multiple games without having to 
hard code in the names of their data files to execute the database program.
Being one of the worlds great procrastinators, I decided to sit on this idea 
for six months or so :-). Finally jarred back to the keyboard by two weeks of
leave pent up with my two lovely children :-( I have put Paul's plan in motion.
So without further ado here's some hints for the running the script. Enjoy by
all means mail me with some suggestions, or better yet, code in your ideas 
and send them to me.

Some last plugs before we start. Send in your registration fees to Paul 
Gibbons and Albin Gershin. When you run both of these programs you'll have
the upper hand on your competition. Thanks to Jim McKinney for all his help
and my corp mates Rich Hibbard, Jeff Trautner, Jim, and Dave for testing the 
script thoroughly everyday. Oops send that money in to Just FUN Software for
your TW Help registration also. Especially now that the command interface in
the game has changed some in version 2.0


Now for the real stuff.

TW Version Considerations:

You'll have to keep both versions of this script around if you're gonna play
in 1.03 and 2.0. Gary has changed the way he handles toggling ANSI in the 
game, and also added line wrapping and a blank line ends message in his EMail
routine, so I just couldn't make one script handle both games.

General Considerations:

You'll have to hard code in the path where you copies of TWFT, TW Assistant, 
TW Explorer reside. These path do differ between versions of Qmodem. It's 
only a matter of not putting a \ in front of the path in the DOS commands 
if you are running v 4.3 of the Shareware version of Qmodem. The rest of the 
variables you need to launch the online programs are taken care of by the 
script. You are limited to 8 characters (hey talk to Microsoft) and you don't 
need to add extentions as the script will do it for you.

TW Explorer Considerations:

Since TW Explorer needs a valid capture file before you can run it you'll need
to run the (S)natch TW Explorer capture file menu option before you try the
(O)pen TW Explorer one. If you forget this the script will nicely blank your 
screen and stare at you for about 200 seconds

That should be it. I don't know how to do the legal stuff so give this to your
friends, withhold it from your enemies and if we get in the same game you  
absolutely cannot run this script. :-)

As for the trademark stuff. You all know who I'm talkin' about so I won't 
insult your intelligence. If the bigboys don't like me using there name 
without crediting their trademarks then look inside the front cover of the 
manual for your terminal program or operating system and you'll find their 
trademarks in there. 


EMail & Corporate Data Considerations:

If any member of your corp has a three word handle in the game, i.e. Ivan the
Terrible, the email program will choke. Dave had a hell of a time getting it
to work with two word names and left it at that.

Also, I'm including a sample CORP.DAT file. Put this file in the directory you
hard code in and the script will overwrite it with you new data. If you 
accidentally erase that file here's the format for it. Even though a QModem
OPENFILE command should take care of making a new script for you, we wanted a
specific format so it has to be set up like this:

        :corp members     (lower case)
        EOD               (upper case)

The Script will handle the rest

Cya,

Tim Stewart

InterNet  =   stewartt@emh.kadena.af.mil
FidoNet   =   6:733/11.2


P.S. I guess I qualify as a real author now, because I rushed this thing out 
and then found two major bugs in it. Older versions will not append the 
$TRADERSTD.BAK file. I had piped it into itself and then erased it, oops. It's
fixed now. I also got rid of the annoying part of the multi-configuration
routines. Now they only prompt you for your game name when they need it, 
instead of every time you run the script.
