Please note that this is beta software, I am using it and all seems well
but beware the ides of March!!! Also, this software is copyright 1994
Prophet Computer Services, all rights reserved Version 0.8 is
unofficially wide beta available. If you run it be aware it is still
pre-release (officially) and that the final version will NOT BE FREE.

The file sample.arj contains the following tidbits...

        sample.opt this contains all of the command line arguments, you
        can specify the default settings you want in a file called
        TPCB.OPT in the working directory or the same directory where
        TPCB.EXE is located.

        sample.ctl this contains all of the configuration options, the
        default name used is TPCB.CTL.

        I have also include my control file for digestion, and yes the
        error is intentional.

All of the processing is contained in these files, sorry but you will
need to do some exploring to do things, the information in the files
should be more than enough to get you moving.

WARNING
-------

TPCB is a TBBS/QSO support utility, it works with the QSO external
message bases only. The PCBoard style messages bases that are created
are happily digested, but the bases are not usable by PCBoard or ANY
OTHER UTILITY.

In order to avoid long scan delays (ie re-scanning each message base for
every -SCAN pass) last message information is kept in the message base
header in the spare bytes.

That is not all, I also store other information in the spare bytes to
provide various other 'nice' processing requirements.

The choice is simple, if you run TPCB on a message base TPCB/QSO own it
to the exclusion of all others (like a marriage hey).

CONCURRENCY
-----------

TPCB is able to scan/toss while QSO is running - notice that I didn't
say while TBBS was running .. it is safe to be tossing/scanning while
QSO is actually doing the same thing. Both programs communicate via
locking, although I do not know whether everything is perfect (and TPCB
is definately processing locking properly) I have not had any problems
with this over 3 months.

The one thing that may not be done is compression while TBBS is running.
When I get renumbering working TPCB will require access to userlog.*
files as well as exclusive use of the message bases as it is renumbering
and compressing.

RENUMBERING
-----------

One thing to remember is that you DO NOT want to renumber your
bases until it is actually required. It stuffs up OLR's when the
messages are renumbered.

LINKING
-------

At this stage message linking is not provided. I will eventually do it
but it has no priority at this stage.

STARTING UP
-----------

I would suggest that you start up by doing something like this...

Go to your existing echomail processing and select some conferences (say
like TBBS) add to the scan list a dummy point address. This will create
traffic for TPCB to process, use BinkTFR (or whatever) to move the
packet/arcmail to the TPCB inbound directory.

Please remember that the area numbers used must be OK for QSO to use and
that you should restrict access to the areas (or your users will get
hold of it all).

Modify the SAMPLE.CTL file (as TPCB.CTL) to process these areas, run
"TPCB -LIST" and review the TPCB.LOG (for errors) and TPCB.LST to make
sure things are as you want.

Next run "TPCB -CREATE" this will build empty PCBoard message bases that
must be present or QSO will barf.

Assuming that you have a straight forward setup run "TPCB -QSO" this
will create a QSO.INC & QSOEXTRN.CTL file to use with QSO.

The INC file can be included into your QSO file thusly :)..

        QSO.CTL...
        .....
        Restrict Priv=255
        Include c:\tpcb\TPCB.INC
        .....

Assuming you have some mail type this "TPCB -TOSS" and you should now
have messages to read using QSO. That's it folks!

Three extra programs in this beta....

TPCBDBF - Create Database
-------------------------
This will take a DTF file (created by "TPCB -DTF") and build a TDBS
database from the information. The command line is "TPCBDBF dtfname" it
will create a file TPCB.DBF.

It has been done this way so that multiple TPCB configurations (running
different networks) can be merged like this;

        TPCB -config tpcbfido.ctl -dtf
        TPCB -config tpcbtrek.ctl -dtf
        TPCB -config tpcbjunk.ctl -dtf
        Copy *.dtf master.txt
        TPCBDTF master.txt
        del *.dtf
        del master.txt

TPCBNDX - Dump Index File
-------------------------
This will read a PCBoard Index file and dump it to STDOUT (use DOS
redirect). The command line is "TPCBNDX c:\tpcb\base.ndx", eg;

        TPCBNDX c:\tpcb\fido\tbbs.ndx >c:\dump.ndx

TPCBMSG - Dump Message Base
---------------------------
Same as above but for the message base, eg;

        TPCBMSG c:\tpcb\fido\tbbs >c:\dump.msg

Enjoy! .. Larry