BESTPROG.TXT (All rights reserved) Wed 15-March-1995 Timo's subjective choice of best PD & SW MS-DOS material -------------------------------------------------------- Note that this list is subjective reflecting my own usages. Hence one cannot "submit" to this list, as some users and authors have done after this list has become fairly widespread. Comments and views are naturally welcome, nevertheless. You are free to quote brief passages from my text provided you clearly indicate the source with an acknowledgment. Please do not distribute any part of this package separately. The addresses of some of the authors can be found in 38653 Feb 26 18:55 garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/author33.zip author33.zip Email addresses of 243 MS-DOS shareware and PD authors asa55c-?.zip The As-Easy-As spreadsheet. At time of writing of this item we only have one shareware spreadsheet to offer from Garbo, but it is all that is needed. This 123 and VP planner compatible spreadsheet gives all the basic functions needed in a good spreadsheet including useful graphics plotting. Highly recommended. ask.exe The most important command originally missing from MS-DOS batch programming. Ask comes under many names and has been rewritten by countless programmers. Also I have written my own in garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/ tsbat46a.zip. The basic idea of asks is to prompt the user for a choice, and return an errorlevel (or sometimes put a value to an environment variable), which then can be used for a conditional jump in the batch in accordance with the user's choice. My own ask uses the most common ask standard of returning as the errorlevel the ascii number of the first letter of the user's response, but I also have written an errorlevel version. It is interesting that MicroSoft finally succumbed and introduced a similar command in MS-DOS 6.0 calling it CHOICE. You can find a choice clone choose.exe in tsutlf14.zip if you don't have MS-DOS version 6+. ced10da.zip Command line editor. This facility lets the user to recall earlier commands, edit the commands, make aliases (synonyms) for the commands, and optionally ignore commands. CED is old, but still extremely useful as such even compared doskey which was introduced with MS-DOS 5.0. Don't go without it, or some other good, alternative command line editor. Despite being old, CED still often features on the best program lists of many computer magazines. The one feature CED unfortunately lacks is file name completion present in some other command line editors. The later versions of CED have gone commercial, as far as I know. For other alternatives, like command line editors with file name completion, see Garbo's /pc/cmdutil directory. dc106f.zip Directory control from the PC-Magazine by Michael Mefford. A simple, but a very useful point and shoot facility to copy, move, rename, or delete files. DC is an excellent example of the fact that a good program doesn't need to be over-packed with features nor need it be flashy. There is also an advanced rendition df460.zip by Gordon Haff called Directory Freedom. The interface is the same but there are much more options, and the program is very configurable. Also highly recommended. But I have a nagging suspicion, with no hard evidence whatsoever, that DF sometimes causes confusion on the disk. dcf49.zip A fast 1-pass copying facility for floppies. One of the most irksome MS-DOS task is copying a floppy in a single drive. (Also finally seen to in the latest MS-DOS versions, I hear.) I have been looking for a suitable 1-pass program to recommend for quite awhile, and found quite a few, and this one is it. It has a nice interface and is fast since it can skip the empty sections. Yet, I originally included this utility with considerable doubts, because there still was ample room for improvement starting from the missing possibility of storing the option settings, removing the nag screen, etc. A simple but useful alternative to look at is xdcpy200.zip. Another option worth looking at is the more professional copyq318.zip. cshow877.zip Much of the information and even recreation comes in the form of GIF pictures. For example, Gargo archives now have an extensive collection of select astronomy images. These required a good viewer, like Bob Berry's the CompuShow GIF viewer both with with a traditional and dialog interface. I prefer the former and have listed that version. Bob has been imporving his program constantly. The 8.77 version can utilize the full properties of the video card, thus giving very sharp images when the video adapter is capable of it. dirmat31.zip Dirmatch for comparing & manipulating two dirs side by side. Another really great utility from Michael Mefford. Originally appeared in the PC-Magazine. dirw.exe From my own garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/tsutil41.zip utility collection. It is like MS-DOS dir /w, but it also shows the file attributes, and it can be made to recurse all the directories. I use it on a daily basis to have a backup list of what my hard disks contain. It is vindicative to note that in DOS 5.0 the new dir command was endowed among other things with abilities what my dirw already had. Yet dirw.exe still has a feature which the MS-DOS dir curiously lacks (at least in MS-DOS 5.0). My dirw.exe displays the size of a disk also if it has no files. dirx110.zip A shell for listing and handling lzexe and pklite etc. compressed executables. A very useful companion to lzexe and pklite. Nothing is perfect, though. The documentation leaves much to be desired in a top utility. But the basic idea is very sound. Most importantly to my knowledge there are no alternatives (which is rather odd) so dirx is left to hold the field at the moment despite its faults and the non-support. Strangely, the author has shown no interest whatsoever in the feedback I have tried to give on the configuration problems with the program. Fortunately such a supercilious attitude is not common among the authors. dosclip.com "A TSR utility that provides Windows-like cut-and-paste facilities to applications running under DOS". A PC-Magazine utility by Douglas Boling in vol11n07.zip. I use it for example for cutting and pasting commands and data when being connected, using MsKermit or Telnet, to your Unix hosts Garbo and Chyde. The only problem is that the hot keys are too common and may thus interfere with other applications. For a patch see garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2 /tspost09.zip. fed153.zip FileEDit binary editor for MS-DOS by Phillip Nickel. Binary (or rather hexadecimal) editors are specialized utilities needed only occasionally for advanced usage. As with ascii editors the choice of one's binary editor is a matter of taste and there are other goods ones like the MicroEMACS-like beav140.zip. See Garbo's /pc/binedit/ directory for the the other, more often updated alternatives like hex41a.zip. fp-216.zip The honors of virus scanning will now have go to Virus Protection system by Fridrik Skulason. It is free for private users while it is fully commercial to institutional usage. All the tests I have seen have ranked it very highly both for its user interface and its virus detecting and protection capacity. Here I want to mention also another very good virus scanning program. McAfee's scn-214e.zip. Both these excellent programs have been kept up to date at a good rate. Both have given exemplary support and both have drawn true world-wide acclaim. Naturally there are other scanners, too, like the very fast TBAV from the Netherlands. All available from Garbo's /pc/virus directory. ftp-list.zip Anonymous FTP FAQ and Site Listing by Perry Rovers. Frequently updated. This list has changed maintainer several times during the last few years, and they all have done a good job. But Perry has taken this lists to new hights. Quite an impressive feat of record keeping. There is also a specialized list for MS-DOS FTP sites which I maintain. It is /pc/pd2/ moder47.zip. Both lists are heavily downloaded from Garbo. gifcm133.zip GIF Commentor to embed/remove text comments by J. Lee. This is practically a maintainer's utility. It allows deleting and inserting text comments into GIF image files. It has been of much use to me in preparing the astronomy and campus GIFs for Garbo. geoclk60.zip GeoClock by Joseph R Ahlgren is an interesting, specialized program. It is a world map with a moving day/night grayline. It can be used for displaying locations of, for example FTP sites, on the world map. gsz0920.zip Full-screen version of Zmodem file transfer protocol. Chuck Forsberg's Zmodem has become the veritable standard of file transfers from BBSes and between PCs and hosts. GSZ brings the visual interface to DSZ that has been formerly lacking while it has been offered by some telecommunication programs such as Telix. In the long run Forsberg's programs must have been one of the the most frequently updated programs on the scene, which is not always an unqualified boon. The pace of updates, has fortunately slacked in 1994-1995. Likewise, I would prefer growing version numbers. But the program is an establishment. inter44*.zip Ralf Brown's MS-DOS Interrupt List. A staggering amount of internal lore absolutely essential for each and every serious PC programmer. Another definitive reference is helppc21.zip, which has some even more advanced material. Another information file of interest to programmers is dosref33.zip. keyrate.exe From my own garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/tsutld22.zip utility collection. What it effectively does is that it speeds up the cursor movement. An absolute necessity because the slow default keyrepeat rate makes moving the cursor a real pain in the neck. Mostly found only in commercial packages. Haven't seen many shareware or PD "competitors", but I may be too "optimistic". MS-DOS 5.0 finally introduced this feature into the mode command, which goes to show that the idea was a good one. - On MS-DOS 3.3 I have in my autoexec.bat "keyrate 0 0". In 5.0 (and 6.0) I use "mode con: rate=30 delay=1" keytap13.zip A Non-TSR User Keystroke Simulator be Neil Faulks. This is what is called a "keyfake" utility. What it does is that it allows you to predefine in a batch what keys will be automatically pressed first when an application is called. Keyfake programs are very handy for customizing in which state you wish to enter some programs, or even skip the initial screens like I do for the VP+ spreadsheet program. The difference in keytap is that unlike other keyfake programs it is not a TSR, but works by like shell. list91b.zip Vernon Buerg's list program, a definite must for file browsing. It is so good that many other programs rely on list instead of having browsing routines of their own. Currently contains three versions of list of varying program sizes. Very handy also as a "grep" finder using the /F option. Like with so many programs I have retained also an older because of the gone features reported by the users. In the case of list the older version retained is /pc/goldies/list77a.zip. mrcry209.zip If you wish to see and excellent mathematics program take a look at Mercury "Equation solver based on Borland's Eureka". It you are familiar with Mathematica you'll see that it can perform many similar mathematical derivation tasks. Specialized, of course. nbird26.zip Not everything has to be totally serious. Relax for once and take a look at "3D animation of bird in flight by N. Centanni, if you have at least a 386 with a VGA. This is strictly pastime, but it gives a very nice pretense of moving. pcopy787.zip Norm Patriquin's really fabulous copy program with a huge selection of useful optional switches. The current version is pcopy93.zip, but the program and its installation have become so bloated that I have personally preferred to stay with an older version. In fact I still use version pcopy 5.0 from /pc/miscutil/patriqui.zip on my old Zenith XT portable. The phenomenon is what the columnist John Dvorak calls excessive featurism. It is not just a question of disk space, and more features than one can usefully master, but also a serious question of increasing loading times despite faster and faster PCs. pcps800.zip In an office with laser postscript printers one need a good postscript program with the ability to handle even the upper ascii characters correctly. Such a utility is provided by Paul Carapetis is his "Print files on PostScript". Besides it has an impressive amount of options. Granted, using any utility like this always will be complicated and requires much experimenting first to get the kind of output one wishes. pklte115.exe PKWare's compress and uncompress executables. One of the great ideas of 1990 came from France from Fabrice Bellard. He wrote lzexe91.zip (currently) to decompress executable at call time by putting the decompression code into the executable. PKWare took the idea (an echo of the ancient .arc debacle?), and developed with their background a more professional product. I must say, however, that I don't like pklite's (commercial version's) ability to make irreversible compressed executables, because this increases the danger of viruses going undetected. Of course, there are reversal programs in circulation to expand even the "irreversible" executables, but this situation is not stylish. pkz204g.exe The most useful all-round archiver. From PKWare. (Earlier surrounded by some totally stone-age hassle around the encryption issue when exported outside North America). Pkzip was born out of the controversy and litigation on .arc archiving. There is also a Unix (actually multi-platform) version of zip by Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Jean-loup Gailly, and others of the InfoZIP programming group. Zip is our now compulsory choice in garbo.uwasa.fi archive maintenance with for example ZOO outdone with its date stamp problems and ARJ with its lack of a proper Unix version. Despite its dominance, pkzip is not without its downsides. Beside the encryption issue, the 2.0 release was advertized in PC magazines almost a year prematurely. It became known as a classic case of vaporware, and at first release pkz204c.zip was outrageously buggy and sloppily documented (the latter aspect still leaves a bit to be desired). But 2.04G is the dominating archiver with perhaps ARJ having the second most following with its excellent multi-disk capabilities. No wonder that the debates about "the best archiver" have been very common for example on the UseNet news. rmail41.zip PC ReadMail news & email & messages & FAQs etc by Jeroen Schipper is an excellent, configurable facility to read news and other kind of digested material off line. qedit3c.zip QEdit Advanced, SemWare's text editor. More than perhaps any other category of programs, the choice of a text editor is a matter of taste. I have opted for QEdit because it has the same basic WordStar-like commands than Borland's Turbo Pascal interface, is nicely configurable, and has a fair macro language for advanced users. The only major thing I personally miss very much is a right-side justification. That is a problem I know was corrected in the fully commercial SemWare Editor (TSE). TSE has a very much improved macro language. If I had to choose one single program to be the number one on my list, this would be it. scram10.zip Why not include also one excellent educational game on this list. My choice then is Scramble (Scrabble) crossword board game by Diana Gruber. This well-known word game is played even competitively. On a computer is it a very good practice of the English language for a non-english user. The game is a nicely programmed realization of the theme. scrlit18.zip A resident screen scrollback utility by Charles Aitkens. This handy TSR utility allows one to scroll back what has been written on the screen. Because the scroll-back buffer reserves a lot of memory even if it sensibly utilizes compression, scrollit is best used with an upper memory manager like loadhigh introduced in MS-DOS 5.0's or lastbyte (see a later item). I have this tsr routinely loaded in my autoexec.bat. This is one case where I have changed my mind when a better utility came around. Originally I had buffit30.zip as my choice, but scrollit can capture colors and some output that buffit can't. So, after the scrollit author made some crucial improvements based on my feedback suggestions in releasing version 1.7, I had a change of heart. shez106.zip A shell ("Compress Companion") to drive the many archivers for MS-DOS (that is for the programs un/compressing and clustering files). By Jim Derr, who has constantly been keeping Shez up to date with archiver developments. Makes life easy with so many alternative archiver methods in use. The number of the menu driven / hotkey options in this program is something to behold. Like most of the other programs on this list, I need it every day. Among its many advanced usages is the possibility of using it to convert archives from one format to another, and much much more. showf251.zip A disk mapping utility by my net friend and Turbo Pascal guru Duncan Murdoch. It is without bells and whistles, but can under special circumstances be a real life-saver. It shows what you have written on your harddisk. Combined with any good screen capture program, you can retrieve at least parts of lost text with it. It once saved me a lot of grief after a program munched one of my text files. Show Fat helped me to retrieve from disk what was essential when the actual file could not be restored by any other correction or unerase program. Duncan's Show Fat is also instructive in showing how data is arranged on your harddisk. shrom24b.zip ShellRoom. Swap to disk when shelling from an application. One of the big problems with many programs that allow the user to shell to Dos, is that the user is left with little memory. This very useful utility remedies that by swapping the application to disk when the application shells. Borland's Turbo Pascal 5.0 is the only important application I have found so far that is not amenable to SHell ROOM. (TP 7.0 no more causes this problem.) snippr26.zip Snip the screen into a file originally by Tom Kihlken in the PC-Magazine. The later versions are tweaks, that is the original source has been developed ("tweaked") by several different savants. This TSR utility can capture text from the screen, and send it to the printer, a file, or the keyboard buffer as if typed. See garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/ tspost09.zip for a patch to customize the Snipper hotkey. Personally I have stayed with /pc/goldies/ snippr24.zip since I do not need the new features. swag.zip SWAG Reader + Information Files, SourceWare Archival Group. Tobether with its data files a hige amout of Turbo Pascal programming lore for the initiated. target15.zip Formerly sst_53b.zip "Seek and thou shalt find Supersonic Search Tool" originally called Whereis. An excellent filename finder by Keith Ledbetter now distributed by McAfee Associates. Fast, with a plethora of useful options including browsing inside archives, executing commands on found files, or even going to the directory of the found file. (Echoes Unix find in many respects). Can also find and list the duplicate files on a hard disk even if there are better, specialized programs in that particular respect. tcpy203.zip TurboCopy, Speedy multi-volume file transfer program. It is particularly useful if you often need to copy material from harddisk to floppy or vice versa. But is it a strange program in a way. One of the files within the package triggered the heuristic virus alert of the f-prot virus checking scanner. The f-prot author Frisk Skulason kindly told me that it does not actually have a virus, but some strange superfluous code at the tail of the executable. Unfortunately the TurboCopy author is unreachable. Another small hitch is that the program muddles the blink attribute. I am a bit hesitant about this entry to my list. In general I wonder why fast copying has not drawn more attention of the programmers. tel2308b.zip Some programs, whether good or less so, are a practical necessity under certain conditions. NCSA Telnet v2.3.08 is such a program. It is used for ethernet connections at our university's PC machines for connecting to our Unix hosts. Recently the Finnish universities decided to adopt the 8-bit latin1 characters with Finnish a" a' o" twists which not even MsKermit cannot handle. One of our programmers, Tuomas Eerola, did a great work of adapting the translation tables and sources for Telnet. tlb-v252.zip The Last Byte MS-DOS Upper Memory Manager by Dan Lewis. It enables loading device drivers and TSRs to high memory. Such a utility becomes a practical necessity when the number of memory-hungry TSRs grows, as happened on my late MS-DOS 3.30 office 386 where I had, for example, a network driver to connect to our department's laser printer. None of the upper memory managers are simple to use, but Dan's is not prohibitively difficult as some others. At the time of first introducing this list Dan was upgrading to 2.00 with a new user interface. (I was of the beta testers, and I don't accept such a task easily because of my own time limitations). Last Byte is a typical example of a utility grown out of deficiencies of the earlier MS-DOS versions. The upper memory management was finally introduced in MS-DOS 5.0 with the all important power user's loadhigh command. Dan has a mailing list on Internet for TLB users. Last Byte still is a fine program, but has naturally lost its edge with the introduction of MS-DOS' own memory management in version 5.0. But it qualifies on the list "for fine services rendered". tlx322-?.zip Telix telecommunications package. There are many excellent telecommunication packages on the scene, and the choice is somewhat arbitrary between them. Telix was one of the first with inbuilt Zmodem, and its user interface is the most convenient I know. None of the telecom progs is completely without problems, and this goes for Telix, too. Another of the fine telecommunication packages is TeleMate. The most prevalent MS-DOS telecommunication program would, however, seem to be the fully commercial Procomm+. But when it comes to terminal emulation rather than full telecommunication none of them can touch the flexibility and power of MsKermit. tsrcom35.zip TSR utilities from TurboPower Software, also a must. Most importantly includes mark, release, and mapmem for unloading terminate and stay resident programs. The veritable standard of TSR maintenance. I have often advised the users of TSRs to apply mark / release from tsrcom rather than using the TSRs' own methods for removing them from the memory because of the danger of leaving holes and finally crashing the machine. uuexe532.zip One of the methods of posting programs on Usenet is to to uuencode the material so that it can be sent as 7-bit ordinary text over the connections. This format cam be used to deliver material by email and in the binary postings newsgroups. There are many programs which can convert such material back and forth. Richards Marks' UUde/encode + XXde/encode is the pick of the lot. .................................................................. Prof. Timo Salmi Co-moderator of comp.archives.msdos.announce Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous FTP archives 193.166.120.5 Department of Accounting and Business Finance; University of Vaasa Internet: ts@uwasa.fi BBS +(358)-61-3170972; FIN-65101, Finland