What should have been in the LZH file: VIEW.TOS The picture viewer program. VIEW_INF.PRG The DESKTOP.INF installer. VIEW_RMV.PRG The DESKTOP.INF de-installer. VIEW.MAN This documentation. There may also be a picture included. What this is: This is View, a small program that lets you view just about any ST picture format. This includes DEGAS (Compressed or Uncompressed), NEOchrome, Tiny, Spectrum, Art Director, and Doodle pictures. It can view any resolution picture, although it requires a color monitor to use. It's small (requires less than 40K) and it's simple to use. This program is also Shareware. If you like it and use it, please send $5 (yes, FIVE DOLLARS!) to: Damien M. Jones P.O. Box 657 APO NY NY 09109 Five dollars is pittance for a handy program like this; in return for sending me this small compensation, I'll add you to my list of registered users and you'll get free updates for as long as this program survives. (Yep, free.) If you send $10, you'll even get a disk with the entire source code (which is mostly GFA BASIC 3.07) and any other good programs I've written in the recent past (which is quite a few). Using View: Place all three programs in the same folder. Run VIEW_INF.PRG from any resolution. Use the fileselector to select the DESKTOP.INF you wish to install View into. Install View into as many DESKTOP.INF files as you wish; if you accidentally try to install View twice in the same DESKTOP.INF, don't worry--the program is smart enough to not do it. After you've modified all the DESKTOP.INF files you want, you can choose "Cancel" from the fileselector; this will exit the program. Now reset the computer. To view pictures, just double-click on them from the desktop. Press any key when you're done viewing the picture. After you have installed View, you do not need to keep VIEW_INF.PRG and VIEW_RMV.PRG with VIEW.TOS. You can move them to another disk or folder for safekeeping. (Especially handy if you install View on a RAM disk; see below.) If you change the folder where VIEW.TOS is located, you must update your DESKTOP.INF files. To do this, first you must de- install View. To do this, run VIEW_RMV.PRG, select the DESKTOP.INF file(s) to de-install View from, and select "Cancel" when finished. Then run VIEW_INF.PRG and re-install VIEW.TOS in its new folder. (VIEW.TOS must be in the same folder as VIEW_INF.PRG, or you cannot install View. VIEW_RMV.PRG, however, can be run from any folder.) If you're not using View on a hard drive (which I assume is most people) then you have a few choices for using View. You can either place View on every disk in the same folder (not recommended, but if you want to, knock yourself out), you can (if you have two disk drives) keep it on one drive (like drive A:) and then use the other drive for switching disks, etc. (also not recommended), or you can place View on a RAM disk (highly recommended). Since View is so small (less than 20K on disk) if you are tight on memory you can make a small RAM disk (i.e. 20K). This is also faster than loading it from disk everytime you need it. The only catch is that you must be sure that VIEW.TOS is placed on the RAM disk when you boot, and when installing View you have VIEW_INF.PRG on the RAM disk also. What VIEW_INF.PRG is doing: Don't read this if you aren't interested. This is purely informational; you don't need to know this to use View. If you've ever used a .TTP program, you know that when you double-click on it from the desktop, GEM pops up a dialog box for you to enter the "parameters". If VIEW.TOS were renamed VIEW.TTP, you could double-click on VIEW.TTP and enter the pathname of the picture you wanted to view. This is a truly pathetic way to use a program. GEM also has another nifty device called "Install Application". This allows you to "install" a certain file type for that application; that is, whenever you double-click on that file type, it runs the program. There are two problems with doing this for View. 1. When you save the desktop, GEM doesn't record the entire path of the application, so when you double-click on the file type, the program has to either be in the root directory, or in the same folder. Very annoying. The only way around this is to edit the DESKTOP.INF file with a word processor and enter the full pathname yourself. 2. View recognizes 14 different file extensions. GEM only allows you to install one. Very annoying. The only way around this is to install it once, and then use a word processor to edit the DESKTOP.INF file, and enter the additional file types yourself. Since both of these problems can be overcome with a word processor, I thought it would be more convenient to write a program to do the processing for you. All VIEW_INF.PRG and VIEW_RMV.PRG are doing is modifying the DESKTOP.INF file in the same way you would have to to achieve the same results. Basically, it installs 14 applications to one program and saves the complete pathname to boot. Known bugs/flaws: If you are using a monochrome emulator (there are several out) I would not recommend trying to use View. Hopefully I will be able to get around this in a future version. No color cycling will be done. This too will be fixed in a future version. Planned improvements: As mentioned, working under a monochrome emulator and using color cycling. Also, an accessory version may be planned. I also plan to rewrite the entire program in assembly language, hopefully reducing program size to less than 10K! Revision history: How can you have a revision history for a version 1.0? I hope you find this program useful. There is more "dmj software" coming, so stay tuned to your local BBS. -dmj