Simtel MSDOS 1992 September/Simtel20_Sept92.cdr/readme.2nd

Text File | 1992-09-15 | 5.4 KB | 137 lines

Welcome to the Walnut Creek CDROM Simtel-20 disc.

To use the disc, you have to:

1) Read the index files & select the files you want to examine.
2) Copy the files to a temporary directory on your hard disk.
3) Examine the individual program files on your hard disk.

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1) Read index file, dir file & select the files you want to examine.
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Read the index files using LIST.COM to figure out what is interesting.  The
index files are INDEX.TXT and DIRS.TXT.  The INDEX.TXT file has a description
of every file on the disc; the DIRS.TXT has a description of every directory.

    E:\LIST E:\INDEX.TXT

where E: is the drive letter of your cdrom drive.

Jot down the files that interest you (and which directories they are in).

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2) Copy the files to a temporary directory on your hard disk.
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To examine individual packages, you have to copy them to your hard disk.
The individual programs come in an archive format called ZIP or ARC,
depending on the file's extension.  Inside the one zip file are often many
other files, all compressed and packaged together.

In order to keep your hard disk from filling up with files, you should
unzip the zip files into a temporary directory on your hard disk.  Type
the commands

    MKDIR C:\TMP

This will "make directory" a directory on your hard disk called TMP.  Now you
can copy a zip file to that directory, unzip it, examine it, and then delete
the entire contents of the directory without erasing anything else of
importance.

To copy a zip file, type something like

    COPY E:\GAMES\ADV350.ZIP C:\TMP

This will copy the file ADV350.ZIP in the \GAMES directory on the E: drive to
the TMP directory on the C: drive.  Please see a DOS manual for more
information about making directories, changing directorys, the copy command,
the path, etc.

To UNARC .ARC files, do the exact same thing with PKUNPAK.EXE.

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3) Examine the individual program files on your hard disk.
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Move into the temporary directory on your hard disk with the following
commands.

    C:
    CD \TMP

Now you are in the same directory as the file from the cdrom disc that you
copied to your hard disc.  Unpack the zip file with the following command

    E:\PKUNZIP ADV350.ZIP

This will unzip the file ADV350.ZIP that we copied from the above example.
You'll have to substitute whatever file name you chose to copy for
ADV350.ZIP.

Now examine the individual files.  A quick way to read everything is to
type

    E:\LIST *.*

which will list all the files.  Most will be binary programs and just display
as random digits, but there will probably be some kind of documentation files
in the package that will explain in detail how the program works.

When you are done with that file, before you start again with step 1 and 2,
you will want to either save some of the parts of the program you just copied
to some other directory, or you will want to erase all the files with the
following command

    DEL C:\TMP\*.*

make Sure you are in the right directory -- this will delete All the files
in the tmp directory.

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copy the utility programs to a directory on your path.
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To use this disc, you need several utility programs included on the disc:
PKUNZIP.EXE and LIST.COM.  To speed access to these programs, you can
install them on your PATH.  Please read a DOS manual for more information
about this.

===================================================================

Other ways of searching the disc.
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You can search the index file quickly if you have an idea what kind of
program you are looking for.  There are several programs on the disc,
including \GREP, and \CDF [Compact Disc Find].  All of these take two
arguments, a string or "regular expression" to search for and a file
name to search in.  For example

    GREP foo INDEX.TXT

will search the file INDEX.TXT for the string "foo" and print every line
with this string in it.  The string can be part of a word.  You can use
this to search the index file for keywords that might describe a program
you are looking for.  GREP searchs with "regular expressions."  Read the
GREP documentation in the \UTILS directory for more information.

The CDF program is a special GREP written for the simtel disc.  It will
display the directory the file is in when it finds a matching string in the
description.

You should put the above programs you want to use on your path by copying
them to your hard disk.

The BBS subdirectory contains programs and index files for different BBS
software including rbbs, pcboard, the opus family, and spitfire.  People who
are not running a bbs need not concern themselves with this.  The BBS
directory has its own readme.

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