As we go along, I'll show you one page and then ask whether you want to see more. Answer with Y or Enter to continue. Answer N or ESC to quit. OLLy is for folks with diminished vision who love to read messages on Electronic Bulletin Boards but seldom post messages. They call us the lurkers. We're usually neither seen nor heard, unless, of course, we have something that needs to be said. Then we'll just log on like we used to do and post it as we used to do, and then resume our quiet mode. With OLLy, one can download a whole bunch of messages from a BBS and read them at leisure. No more worries about how much time you have left. The goal we set when designing OLLy was to have a mail reader system that could be used with only two keys -- the Enter key to continue or do the next thing, and the ESC key to stop doing something or to go back to a previous menu. I think we came pretty close. However, you can use other keys to do other things if you want to. As an aside here, as time went by I kept looking for easier ways to go on. You might also try down-arrow or space bar when Enter would work. At some menus you will see several choices represented by letters or by arrow keys. It might look line this:  When one of the choices is H or ?, pressing that key will show you what all the choices do. When one of the letters is enclosed in brackets [ ], that option will be done if you press Enter as well as if you press the letter. Now I assume that you know how do download a QWK package from your favorite bulletin boards. If you don't yet know how, you can read the QWK tutor at the end of this program. So, now you have one or more QWK packages somewhere on some disk in your system. The program will find them (if you have told it where to look, see configure, below) and ask you to choose which one to use first. When the program shows you the packages available (if any), it also gives you the option to reconfigure OLLy (in case you need to change the path to the packages) or to shell to dos (in case you need to copy or rename a package). If OLLy can find packages, you will see the list. The names will be like the names of the BBSs from which you got the QWK files.  HOMESTED.QWK  MYBOARD.QWK DATADATA.QWK If you have more than four packages, only the first four will be seen. The name of the first package will be highlighted (i.e., it will be black_on_white instead of white on black). Hit Enter and the first package will be unpacked and made ready for reading. If you have more than one package, you can use the up and down keys to highlight the one you want to read next. Hitting Enter will always open the package whose name is highlighted. OLLy recognizes and handles PKUNZIP, PAK, ARJ, and LHA compression. If a package doesn't seem to be any of those, you will be asked whether you want OLLy to try with PAK anyway. The appropriate compression program must be in the default path. While the unpacking is underway, we'll go back to an 80 column screen and let the unpacker show us what it's doing. That could be hidden, but then it might get boring with NOTHING doing on the screen. While we're on that screen we'll show the WELCOME screen from the BBS (in ANSI artwork if you want). Sysops (SYStem OPerators, the guys who own the BBSs) go to some trouble to draw those things, let's do the right thing and show it, if it's there. One of the files in the package may be a pointers file, ending in PNT That file, if present, is copied to the directory holding the QWK packages. A copy of that file is kept by the bbs to tell its packing program which messages you have read. If a package gets munged during download, and can't be unpacked, you still have the pointers file from the last download. You can call the bbs again, upload the old .PTR file, and thereby reset the pointers and lose nothing! Information in a package can be in four types: MAIL NEWS BULLETINS NEWFILES MAIL is the stuff of BBSing; it includes all the messages users of boards around the world have posted. NEWS is announcements from the Sysop. BULLETINS also come from the Sysop, but they are usually in the form of tables of usage of the board (how many files downloaded by whom) or regular features such as astrology and weather forecasts. NEWFILES is a listing of files recently added to the board for downloading.  MAIL  NEWS BULLETINS NEWFILES You might not find all four kinds of information in a package. If there is no MAIL, some BBSs won't send you a package, so it would be rare to find a package with no MAIL. But there may be no NEWS, if the Sysop uses NEWS for new stuff only. There may be no BULLETINS, but it's unlikely. And there may be no NEWFILES is nobody has sent any up recently. OLLy will give you a menu of the kinds of information available in a package. MAIL will be highlighted. Just press Enter to start reading mail. Or press ESC to quit reading anything from this BBS package. If you'd rather read NEWS or NEWFILES before you read MAIL, use the  and  to highlight what you want to read, and then press Enter. MAIL is divided into conferences. You choose which conferences you want to follow by selecting them while you're logged on the BBS. When you choose MAIL at the menu, OLLy will show you a list of conferences which have mail. The first conference in the list will be highlighted. Press Enter and you will start reading mail from that conference. When you have read all the mail in that conference, you will come back to the conferences menu with the next conference in the list highlighted. Pressing Enter will always take you to the messages in the highlighted conference. Each message in a conference is presented individually. You will see the date of the message, the sender, the addressee, the subject of the message, and the number of lines (approximate) in the message. Below that you will see a menu line that looks like this:  You can then hit Enter or R to read the message.   skips this message and goes on to the next one in the conference (unless this is the last one).  goes to the previous message in the conference (unless this is the first one in the conference).  G allows you to Go to any message by entering its number. You can see the number of messages in the conference. When asked, enter a number between 1 and that highest number and press Enter.  S is used to Save the message. You will be asked to enter a file name (8 characters plus extension only) for the saved message. If you enter PRN, the message will be sent to your printer instead of to your disk. Messages are added to the named file, they don't replace the named file. Use a new name for a new file. Use an old name if you want to add the new stuff to the end of the old file.  If you hit X or ESC you will leave the conference and go back to the menu for choosing which conference to read. The ? or / or H or h key will give you a list of what each key does. When you elect to read a message, the message will be shown. If there are more than 11 lines in the message, the program will show the first 11 lines and then ask you MORE? [Y] or N. Press Y or Enter or Page Down or  to continue reading the rest of the message. Press N or ESC to quit reading this one message. At the end of a message (or when you quit reading it with No more) you will see a menu line that looks like this:  Press Enter or  to go to the next message in the conference (unless this is the last one). Press  to go back to the previous message (unless this one is the first in the conference). Press A to read this message Again.  Press S to save this message as described above. Press X or ESC to quit the conference and go to the conference selection menu. Press ? or / or H to see help on the options. When you have read all the messages in a conference, or have exited the conference with X or ESC, you will go back to the conference selection menu with the next conference in the list highlighted. Press Enter to read the messages in that conference, or use the  or  to select a different conference. Press ESC to quit MAIL and go back to the types menu for NEWS, NEWFILES, and BULLETINS. MAIL  NEWS  BULLETINS NEWFILES NEWS is a single long file the Sysop continually adds information to, and on rare occasions deletes old information from. New info is added to the beginning of the file, so you start reading with the most recent stuff. At the end of each page, you will be asked whether you want MORE [Y] or N. Press Enter or Y to read more, or press N or ESC to leave the news reader. MAIL NEWS  BULLETINS  NEWFILES When you select BULLETINS from the type menu, you will see a menu of all the BULLETINS in the package. They will be listed only by number (e.g. BLT-0.1 BLT-0.2 BLT-0.3, etc.). The first bulletin in the menu will be highlighted. Press Enter to start reading the highlighted bulletin, or use the   keys to select a different bulletin to read. The bulletin which is highlighted when you press Enter is the one which will be shown. You can, of course, press ESC to exit the bulletin reader and go back to the types menu. BULLETINS are presented differently. They are frequently tables formatted for 80 columns. If we simply broke the line into 20 or 40 characters, the tabled data might look really strange. So, we don't break the lines in a bulletin. OLLy will show you the first 20 or first 40 columns of the first 10 lines of the bulletin. Then you'll see these menu lines:  If you press the right arrow, the display window shifts one column to the right, showing columns 2 to 21, or 2 to 41. Press left arrow to move back one column.  Press > or Shift  to move 5 columns or 10 columns right. < or Shift  moves 5 or 10 columns left. Press Home to move to the left as far as possible. Press End to move to the right as far as possible.  Press  to show the next line in the bulletin (i.e. lines 2 to 11 the first time). Press  back up one line. Press PgDn or PgUp to move 9 lines up or down. Press X or ESC to quit reading this bulletin. Press ? or / or H to read a help file explaining the choices. MAIL NEWS BULLETINS  NEWFILES  NEWFILES is a listing of files recently added to the board and available for downloading. OLLy will show you each file in turn. You will see the name of the file, the date it was uploaded, how long (number of bytes) it is, and the first line of description of the file. Then you will be asked to press any key to see the next file. If you press ESC the NEWFILES reader stops and returns you to the types menu. Press any other key to see the next new file. When you're through reading the stuff from a package, just keep pressing ESC until you're out of it. When the ESC occurs at the types menu you will be asked whether you really want to quit reading from that package. If you decide that you don't want to quit yet, press N. Y or Enter or ESC takes you out of the package, showing the Sysops `goodbye' screen if there is one, and playing his goodbye music if there is some, and if your configuation allows for it. OLLy then cleans out (deletes) all the mail, bulletins, etc. When it has cleaned up, OLLy will probably rename the .qwk package. Some download programs will fail if there is already a file on the disk with the name they use. Therefore one should either delete or rename a package after it has been read. OLLy gives you choice here. You can set it to automatically rename the package using the date rather than QWK as extension (.912 for Sept 12, D23 for Dec. 23). If you'd rather not automatically rename, you can tell OLLy to leave it alone, or you can tell it to ask each time whether or not to do a re-naming. After the renaming, OLLy goes back to the place you choose a package to read, shows you which packages are still available for reading. Note that if you let OLLy rename a package after unpacking it, it will no longer appear on the package menu. If there are no more packages you will be told so, and then you can press Enter or ESC to quit the OLLy program. If there are more packages, choose one by highlighting it, then press Enter to start reading it. If you don't want to read any of them, press ESC and OLLy quits. By the way (BTW), OLLy always returns to the 80 column test screen (SCREEN 0) when it ends. If you need to end up on another screen, run OLLy from a batch file which sets the mode on return from OLLy.  CONFIGURING OLLy  You will need a configuration file to tell OLLy how to do its thing. The first time OLLy is run, or anytime it cannot find the OLLy.CFG file, the program jumps to a configuration routine. Answer the questions as they occur. When a default answer [in brackets] is given, you can accept the default by pressing Enter. You will have to choose a font, as you did above. Choose 20 of 40 characters per line. The default is 20. The file named BLT.FNT must be in the current path. (i.e., the DIR command by itself will show it.) You will be asked to specify the path to be used to find some files and to save other files. All the paths must be fully qualified. They must start with a drive letter followed by a colon -- a: or b: etc. If you specify a path that doesn't exist, OLLy will crash when you run it. If OLLy crashes because of a bad path name in the config file, delete the OLLy.CFG file and run him again. You can change the setup any time at the BBS choice menu by pressing PgUp. You will be asked to enter the path OLLy will follow to find the QWK packages. The default for that is A:\ You will be asked to enter the path OLLy can use for working space as it unpacks packages. Again the default is A:\ You can specify any path you want, but remember that things go faster the shorter the path i.e., A: will be faster than A:\COMM\RIME\QWK\ OLLy will create a new working subdirectory named OLLys at the end of the path. Be sure you don't have a subdirectory called OLLys in the path you specify - it will be zapped. If you can set up a RAM drive, and specify it as the data path the unpacking and message finding will go much faster. You will be asked to specify a path for OLLy to use when you tell it to save a message to disk. The default is A:\ When you tell OLLy to save a message, he will ask you for a file name. You can enter only the name for the file, no disk or directory designators. OLLy will use the path specified here. Then you will be asked to tell OLLy about renaming QWK packages after the unpacking is done. The BBS from which you download a package always uses the same name for the package it sends (e.g., COFFEE.QWK). DSZ and maybe some other download protocols will fail if there is already a file by that name in your download directory, as there would be if you got a package yesterday and it's still here. Your choices are Yes, rename it automatically; No, leave it alone; and Ask, ask me before you rename it. The renamer changes the extension from QWK to month and day (103, 205, 615), using O for Oct, N for Nov and D for Dec. Next you will be asked to tell OLLy how to handle 8-bit characters. These are characters with values above 127. They are sometimes called High ASCII characters for short and include many characters not used in English, but are used mostly for drawing boxes, ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» º like this. º ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ But since those boxes are formatted for maybe 76 columns of text, they can get pretty ugly when reformatted to 20 or 40 columns. You can delete the high ASCII characters, or replace them with spaces, or you can leave them alone and have them shown as they occur. The default is replace with spaces. (Saved messages keep the original characters, as well as the original 80 column format.) Finally comes the Music question. Some BBSs put a musical opus in the logoff procedure. You can elect to hear the music, or not. Note that ANSI.SYS is not required for this music. Fair warning, Bach ain't back. You can change the configuration file (OLLy.CFG) with a standard text editor, or you can change your set-up by pressing PgUp at the menu for selecting which bbs mailbag to read. When you reconfigure with PgUp, the changes can be permanent or just for the current session. Incidentally, if you're using a floppy-only system, be sure the dos file COMMAND.COM is in the default path. Many OLLy procedures require it. And, if you tell the BBS to send ANSI graphic stuff for the welcome and goodby screen, be sure you have a DEVICE=ANSI.SYS statement in your CONFIG.SYS file.  The QWK tutor  Whole conferences are dedicated to off-line readers and configuring the bbs end of the things. This is the KISS version, and should give you enough info to start reading those conferences. To start, call the bbs which uses a qwk packer like DjMail by Derrick Burgess or MarkMail by Mark Turner. If you are asked whether you want fancy colors and stuff (i.e., the ANSI question), say No unless you specify have ANSI.SYS in your configuration. ANSI stuff, without ANSI.SYS looks like this -- 44hello! Makes for hard reading but doesn't hurt anything. The color stuff will work only in the Welcome and Goodbye screens. OLLy can't handle them in the messages. Next, go to the mail exporter section of the BBS. You might see that as an option from the main menu. In other cases the mail packer will be in `door'. If you don't see a menu option for an offline reader, type OPEN and hit Enter. You'll see a list of DOORs. Press the number beside the mail packer. (Next time you can just say OPEN #, where # is the number you just found.) That will take you to the program. When you get to the mail packer, if you don't see a menu, press ? and Enter to bring up the menu. Now you need to do two things - Select the conferences you want to follow, and set some options to fit your system. The menu will tell you which key to start selecting conferences, so hit it. The conferences will appear in a menu and may be selected by number. For each conference you select, you will also have to say which mail you want to read - all of it, just that addressed to you, or just that addressed to either you or to ALL. Then you'll see the numbers of the oldest and newest message in the conference (on that bbs). Set you pointer to maybe 10 lower than that of the newest message. Continue until you have selected all the interesting conferences on that bbs. Then you'll need to set the options. That might be in a separate menu or in the first menu. You'll need to select a Transfer Protocol, and will be given a menu of those the bbs can use. If you have Zmodem, that's probably the best of the widely available protocols right now. If not, choose a protocol your terminal software includes. You'll might also need to specify a packing program. PKZIP/PKUNZIP seem to be the most popular now, but PAK and ARJ have supporters. (Remember that you must have the unpacker, and it must be in the default PATH.) If you are asked whether you want to include index (NDX) files, say Y. If they are not included in the packet, OLLy will build them, but that takes time. Other options include things like whether or not you want to receive Bulletins or News, and how many messages to allow per conference,etc. For starters, leave everything as it is. You can change it later if you want to.