Frequently-Asked Questions about Tribal Voice's PowWow

This document is intended to answer the most Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ's) about Tribal Voice's PowWow software. This FAQ is a supplement to the PowWow's online help. The online help is included with PowWow and is named POWWOW.HLP.

If you have not read the online help please do so before proceeding. It contains crucial information about installing and configuring PowWow as well as helpful troubleshooting information that can be used to resolve the most common technical issues.

This FAQ is constantly being updated as new versions of PowWow are released and new questions arise. The most recent version of this FAQ can always be found on Tribal Voice's ftp server from the following URL:

PowWow is a MS-Windows-based communications program for the Internet that allows up to nine (9) users to chat via typing or voice, send files, view personal home pages and JPEG pictures, and cruise the World-Wide Web (WWW) together. Version 2.x added a multiple-user confernce mode, voice chat at 14,400bps, and many other features. PowWow works with Windows 95 and Windows NT).

A3) What are the system requirements for PowWow?

PowWow requires a computer running Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT with a TCP/IP (Internet) connection in order to chat.

PowWow has been tested with the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0
• Microsoft Windows 95 (4.00.950, 4.00.950a, and 4.00950b)

PowWow is not available for the MacIntosh, Unix, or OS/2 Presentation Manager (native mode) operating systems nor are there any plans to port PowWow to these operating systems any time in the near future.

PowWow has been tested with the following TCP/IP stacks:

• Microsoft Windows 95 TCP/IP (4.00.950, 4.00.950a, 4.00.950b)
• Microsoft Windows NT TCP/IP (3.51, 4.0)

PowWow works with Attachmate Emissary 2.0beta 3 or later, Netscape Navigator 1.1N or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows 95 Version 2.0 and 3.01 or later, and Softronics Softerm browser 4.00.08 or later.

In order for PowWow links, web-cruising and other PowWow-WWW browser features to work PowWow must be able to communicate with the WWW browser. This is done through a process called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). The August 1996 release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 does not have the particular DDE functions PowWow requires to do this.

Microsoft Internet Explorer releases after October 1996, Version 3.01 (build 4.70.1215) and 3.02 (build 4.70.1300) do work with PowWow, as does the production release of Internet Explorer 4.0 (4.71.1712.6). Please note the developers' and preview releases of Internet Explorer did not work correctly with PowWow. You can check which version you have by clicking on Help¦¦About Internet Explorer from the menu.

To obtain one of these WWW browsers go to the following sites:

PowWow has been tested with the following sound cards:

• Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE 32
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE 64

However, any Microsoft Windows-compatible sound card should work.

PowWow has been tested with Internet connections ranging from dial-up SLIP and PPP connections at 9,600 bps up to direct network connections using a T-1 data line. Naturally, faster network connections allow PowWow to operate faster.

In order to use the voice chat feature of PowWow, an Internet connection of at least 14,400bps is required.

No. PowWow's voice chat is built-in and does not require a DSVD modem. If you are using a DSVD modem with PowWow make sure DSVD is disabled to allow PowWow the full bandwidth of the modem connection.

Each time PowWow is run it sends your PowWow Address, IP address, and password to the Tribal Voice PowWow Registration Database Server for verification. The "Attempting to register…" message, followed by "Registration accepted by PowWow server" is what you see of this process on your computer once registration is complete.

Your PowWow Address can be up to 199 characters long. Specifically, your individual name can be up to 49 characters in length and your domain name can be up to 150 characters in length (including the at "@" sign).

Up to nine people (eight people and yourself) can chat together using PowWow Version 3 or later. If you have PowWow Version 3.2 you can participate in Communities which allow 1,000 people to chat together.

If you try to page someone who is connected to the maximum number of users, or if joining them would bring you over the maxumum number of users, the connection will be refused.

To change your PowWow Address, go to Users¦¦Preferences…User Info and enter a new PowWow Address into the Local Username: field. You may also want to change your password by entering a new password into the Password: field.

No, in order to use PowWow your PowWow Address and email addresses must be the same. The PowWow answering machine uses email in order to send and receive messages. If your PowWow Address is different than your email your answering machine will not work.

At the Tribal Voice PowWow White Pages server, you can find other users to chat with or add yourself so that others may chat with you. To reach the White Pages server, go to the following URL:

To use the voice chat feature, you need at least a 14,400 bps connection to the Internet. At 9,600 bps the connection rapidly gets worse until you can't hear anything intelligible.

For best results:

• Set your voice resolution to high by selecting User¦¦ Preferences…¦¦Sound/Voice from the Main Menu).
• Close any other applications, such as WWW or FTP software, which use your Internet connection.
• Use a good-quality microphone for recording (check your sound card's manual or technical support department for tips on which type of microphones work best and how to get best results).
• Use the audio mixer utility that came with your sound card to adjust the gain for the microphone, wave sound and speaker settings.
• Test your microphone with the Sound Recorder applet from your Accessories folder (the filename is C:\WINDOWS\SOUNDREC.EXE for Windows 3.x computers, and C:\WINDOWS\SNDREC32.EXE for Windows 95 and NT 3.51 computers).
• For best results, hold your microphone 12 inches (30cm) away from your mouth (your manual may recommend more or less distance-use whatever it says).
• Use a stand with your microphone or place it on a flat surface where it will not move around.
• Contact your sound card vendor and obtain the newest drivers for your sound card.

This message appears when the person you are trying to reach receives your chat request but does not reply before a time-out occurs at your end. A time-out occurs after sixty (60) seconds. To increase the time, add the line

TIMEOUT=120

This will increase the time to 120 seconds. If the this does not work, the person you are trying to call has probably left their computer and not turned the answering machine on. Try sending them email with the date and time you tried to call them.

This occurs when PowWow cannot reach the person you are trying to contact before a time-out occurs. Reasons for this include:

This message is displayed when the person you are paging declines your chat. Try sending them email with the date and time you paged them instead.

This message appears for three reasons:

PowWow stores the names (Sound I.D.'s) and locations (path and filename) of .WAV sounds files in the [SOUNDS] section of your C:\WINDOWS\POWWOW.INI file. If a bad entry is in this section PowWow will not display or play sounds correctly (you may hear your default Windows sound instead). Entries in the [SOUNDS] section should look like:

[SOUNDS]
ABLE=C:\POWWOW\ABLE.WAV
Bravo=C:\PowWow\Bravo.Wav
charlie=c:\powwow\charlie.wav

If you find any blank lines, lines missing either a name or a location, lines with garbage characters, or other malformed entries in the [SOUNDS] section you must remove them before PowWow can play the sounds. Examples of bad entries:

[SOUNDS]
=                                       (missing name and location)
Bravo=                                  (missing location)
=c:\powwow\charlie.wav                  (missing name)
DELTA=C:\POWWOW\DELTA.WAV!@#$%^         (garbage characters in filename)
ECHO=C:\POWWOW\WAV                      (missing filename)

To fix this use a text editor such as Notepad or Write to remove the bad entries from the [SOUNDS] section of your C:\WINDOWS\POWWOW.INI file.
After making the changes to the [SOUNDS] section go to the the [PowWow] section and change the SOUND_COUNT value to the current number of sounds you now have in the [SOUNDS] section of your C:\WINDOWS\POWWOW.INI file. Save the file and re-run PowWow for the changes to take effect.

A Community is a new form of interaction introduced in PowWow Version 3.2. It loosely-based on (and greatly expands on) the Conferencing chat model introduced in Version 2.0.

In a Community up to 1,000 people can simultaneously chat with each other. Communities can be Moderator or they can be left unmoderated. If the Community is moderated the person running it can display pages on each attendee's World-Wide Web browser as well as select who gets to talk.

In Personal Communicator mode, up to nine (9) people chat together in a group. They can chat with each other via keyboard, by voice, cruise the World-Wide Web, play .WAV files, and transfer files.

In a Community, up to 1,000 people can chat together via keyboard, listen to a speaker or speakers and view World-Wide Web pages accessed by the Community moderator. Conversations can be saved to disk.

When people chat in the Personal Communicator, their text is streaming, e.g., sent immediately to the other people they are chatting with keystroke-by-keystroke. When people chat in Community Mode, their text is in block-mode, e.g., sent only when the Enter key or [send] button is pressed.

Communities can be used when you want to talk with more than nine (9) people at a time, need to control who is talking, or need to keep a log of what has been said.

Communities can be used for providing online presentations, lectures, training, and other discussions.

You don't have to. However, we will only list Communities which are available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. At the current time, we do not have the resources to list Communities which are not continuously available.

You can remove sounds by going into QuikSound, clicking on them with the right mouse button and selecting Remove from the pop-up menu.

In Version 2.2, Tribal Voice changed the way bitmapped images are stored in PowWow. This can cause garbled images with certain types of Windows 3.1 video drivers.

You can fix this in three ways:

1. Upgrade to a newer version of PowWow.
2. Upgrade your video card's device drivers to a newer version. If you are using Windows 3.1 drivers and using Windows 95 you need to install Windows 95-specific drivers for your video card
3. Disabling this function by running PowWow and clicking on User¦¦Preferences¦¦Special Video Card Settings… and checking Disable Advanced Graphics.

To determine which video drivers you have go to Program Manager, open the Main Group, and run Windows Setup. Your current video drivers will be listed under Display:.

In order to speed up the video display PowWow makes use of certain Windows video commands, such as StretchBlt. Some older Windows 3.x video device drivers do not correctly support this command. This problem has been noted primarily in video cards using Cirrus Logic CL GD-54xx chips, ATI Mach32 video cards, and Media Vision Pro Graphics video cards.

You can fix this in two ways:

1. Upgrade your video drivers to a newer version which handles compressed bitmaps.
2. Disabling this function by running PowWow and clicking on User¦¦Preferences¦¦Special Video Card Settings… and checking Disable Advanced Graphics.

To run PowWow from behind a firewall, contact your network security administrator and ask him to configure the firewall so that TCP and UDP ports 13223 are enabled for bidirectional access and TCP port 23213 is enabled for outgoing access.

PowWow cannot be run from behind a proxy server or gateway that functions as a proxy server.

B27) PowWow Setup reports it cannot find _SETUP.DLL and _ISRES.DLL files, cannot find a location to store temporary files in, cannot decompress or copy files, or otherwise cannot continue the installation process.

The setup program requires your computer have a temporary directory on your hard disk to unpack files used during the setup process. At the end of the setup process these files are removed. To make a temporary directory on your computer first create the directory and then add a line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT which says:

SET TEMP={pathname of temporary directory}

If you use Windows 95 or NT, make sure the directory uses a short ("8.3"-style) name, not a long-name like "C:\Temporary Files".

For example, you could use:

SET TEMP=C:\TEMP

for your temporary directory. The drive which has the temporary directory should have at least 4Mb of disk space free.

NOTE: If you have done all the above and still receive errors while running Setup delete the contents of the temporary directory and re-run Setup.

This error message can appear if you are using an older version of PowWow. To fix it, uninstall PowWow, download the current version, and reinstall PowWow. Your settings will be preserved.

To prevent all chat requests click on Setup¦¦Runtime from the Main Menu and set Chat Requests to Refuse.

To block chat requests from a specific person, domain, or IP address use the Call Blocking Book. You can access it by clicking on Setup¦¦Call Blocking Book from the main menu.

In order for you to chat with someone both people must be running PowWow at the same time. Make sure all parties are running PowWow and that it does register successfully. You will see a message in the status bar at the bottom of the PowWow window when the program registers sucessfully.

This can occur for several reasons:

• One or more of the people you are chatting with is using an older version of PowWow which does not support as many connections as yours.
• One or more of the people you are chatting with is using an older TCP/IP protocol stack (WINSOCK.DLL).
• One or more of the people you are chatting with is running PowWow over a SLIP or PPP emulator such as TIA or SLiRP.
• One or more of the people you are chatting with has their Answering Machine turned on.
• One or more of the people you are chatting with has their Chat Requests option set to Refuse.

Upgrading your TCP/IP protocol stack and and PowWow to the newest versions available usually solves this problem.

If you are able to type but do not see anything except your cursor then your text and background are set to the same color.

To change your colors, click on the color selection box in the upper right corner of PowWow with your left and right mouse buttons. If you do not see the color selection box try making your PowWow window larger.

The Direct Connect option allows people to run PowWow over an intranet (or other private TCP/IP-based network) when they do not have access to the Internet. They can only talk with other users on the LAN.

To use the Direct Connect option, check the Direct Connect specify the IP address or fully-qualified domain name after the username in place of the domain name.

NOTE: If this does not make any sense to you do not know what this option is then LEAVE IT ALONE. This is for people on LAN's or WAN's with a network card in their computer who do not have regular access to the Internet. If you can access the Internet (email, WWW, etc.) then leave this turned OFF.

This message is displayed when the information for your POP3 and SMTP servers is incorrect.

To fix, contact your Internet service provider's technical support department and get the correct addresses for your POP3 and SMTP servers. Run PowWow, select Setup¦¦Mail Send and Receive from the Main Menu, and enter the POP3 and SMTP server addresses. Click on OK when done to save the addresses.

World-Wide-Web-based email services such as Juno and Hotmail and online service providers such as MSN and AOL do not support SMTP or POP3 services. To turn these off so you may use PowWow go into Setup¦¦Mail Send and Receive and turn off Send messages on failed connect and Check messages on startup.

This message is displayed when your TCP/IP protocol stack (WINSOCK.DLL) cannot determine the route to the other computer over the Internet. If you have "Direct Connect" checked when you page them try un-checking it and paging them again.

Yes, PowWow chats can be started from a World-Wide Web browser provided both PowWow and a compatible World-Wide Web browser are running. To page someone, enter their PowWow Address into the URL (location) field of the web browser using the following format:

powwow:user@domain.org

Note that unlike most URL's, PowWow does not use two slashes "// " in the location field. For example, typing:

powwow:powwow-support@tribal.com

into the Location field of your web browser would connect you with Tribal Voice's technical support department. This function may be used by World-Wide Web administrators to communicate directly with a person who is viewing a given web page.

Yes. The following HTML tag creates a link to PowWow:

<A HREF="powwow:user@domain.org">

The following HTML tag creates a button (form) to PowWow:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="powwow:user@domain.org"><INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Click here to PowWow"></FORM>

Remember that PowWow must be running on both computers, and the user selecting the PowWow link must be using a compatible web browser (see A5).

A copy of the PowWow icon is available from the following URL:

There are several places you can find sound card manufacturer's device drivers on the Internet. Here's a partial listing of WWW sites:

There are several places you can find the latest updates for TCP/IP (WinSock) software. Here is a partial listing of TCP/IP vendors:

There are several places you can go for more information about TCP/IP (WinSock):

No, .WAV and .JPG files are data files and contain no executable code a virus could attach itself to or spread from. You can use PowWow to transfer executable files, however, which you should treat as any new program you have received.

D6) Where can I find the latest drivers for my video card?

There are several places you can find video card manufacturer's device drivers on the Internet. Here's a partial listing of WWW sites:

The Mwave audio adapter/modem card uses a special type of computer chip from IBM called a DSP (digital signal processor) to play sounds and function as a modem. Each of these functions requires a slice of processing time from the DSP.

As a result, the DSP may not be able to handle both high-speed V.34 (28,800 baud or faster) connections and full-duplex (bidirectional) audio at the same time.

Here are some steps you can try to improve the performance of your Mwave-based sound card:

• contact your vendor and obtain newer MWave device drivers
• Disable V.42 error correction by issuing an AT\N0 command to the modem (or other command if appropriate)
• Disable MNP compression by issuing an AT\N4 command to the modem (or other command if appropriate)
• Enable the FIFO buffer and hardware compression in your modem's settings (if applicable)
• Locate the MWAVE.INI file(s) on your computer and try changing the IPS=24900000 statement to IPS=27000000 or IPS=29000000 (this may decrease system stability)
• Use the Mwave audio in Sound Blaster (not Sound Blaster Pro) emulation mode
• Connect to your Internet at 14,400 baud instead of a V.34 connection at 28,800 baud
• Use half-duplex instead of full-duplex audio on V.34 connections (28,800 baud)

You can also try disabing the audio and/or modem portion of your Mwave card and installing a seperate sound card and/or modem in place of it.

For more information contact the company from which you purchased your Mwave device. Here is a partial listing of companies producing MWave devices: