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VUC4DOS

voidstar Utility Collection for (MS/DR/PC) DOS

These are all 8088-compatible (can run on IBM PC 5150). I haven't tried these with any DOS older than 3.3.

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VOIDSTAR'S UTILITY COLLECTION

PREPARED August 12th, 2021

The following are a collection of programs I wrote in the early 1990s. The source code for these programs were destroyed in my first (and only) complete hard drive crash that happened around 1995. Often some files can be recovered in such a crash, but in this case, it was a total lost. It hurt, I cried, but the world didn't end.

I also lost all the config and user data files for my BBS (originally named The Lost Cities, later renamed to COTU - Center of the Universe). But by the mid-1990s, dial-up internet was becoming available in my area (North Florida), effectively replacing the need for any single-connection BBS.

All of these utilities were likely written in some version of Turbo Pascal.

To avoid any doubt on the matter: I officially release all of these executables to the Public Domain. All the original source code to these projects have long been lost.

Before my infamous hard drive crash, I was striving to build up my own software development shop. I started with the name High Magic Software, and later changed to Provident Software (to sound more mature). These are likely not the most recent build of these programs, they were older backups that we happened to find in my old closest on 3.5" disks around 2019. That said, some of them may still be useful, but there is no way to easily correct or modify any of them with no source code being available. (the spellings errors in CDIR could probably be corrected with a HexEditor though).

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Summary of utilities:

PROGRAM SIZE/DATE DESCRIPTION

  • 2ARJ.EXE 9K/???? Convert ZIP2ARJ |works by invoking SHELL commands to PKZIP and ARJ

  • ADDZIP.EXE 6K/1991 Add ZIP Comment |works by invoking PKZIP -C, can search wildcards and uses provided file as the comment

  • ANSMACRO.EXE 6K/1991 ANSI Macro |uses ANSI.SYS to define keyboard macros

  • MACRO.KEY |support file for ANSMACRO.EXE

  • MACRO.LST |support file for ANSMACRO.EXE

  • ASK.EXE 10K/???? * Ask User |used in scripts to ask a question and then uses ERRORLEVEL to determine the response to the question

  • ASKDEMO.BAT |an example of how to use the ASK.EXE errorlevel results

  • CARRIER.EXE 6K/1992 Carrier Detect |examines COM port to see if a carrier is present, returns different ERRORLEVEL if so (requires a FOSSIL.SYS driver)

  • CDIR.EXE 15K/1995 * ColorDIR 3.1b |use “cdir ?” because “cdir -h” seems to causes lockup

  • CDIR30.EXE 11K/1991 ColorDIR 3.0 |funny “cdir -h”, can run out of memory if there is a large number of files in the folder

  • CHATTRIB.EXE 20K/1991 ChangeAttributes |really just my intro to Pascal and using the OPRO GUI library

  • CLOCK.EXE 9K/1991 Clock In/Out |writes current time to a specified command line filename, I used it to track my time at my first job

  • DELALL.EXE 7K/1991 DeleteAllFiles |delete all files of a given wildcard; typically I used this to remove extra FILEID.DIZ

  • DELSIZE.EXE 7K/1991 DeleteSize |delete files of a specified byte size; typically I used this to remove 0 byte files

  • EDIT.EXE 31K/1991 TextEditor |I believe this is a real-mode program and limited to editing files no longer than 64KB

  • FILELIST.EXE 15K/???? Make FileList |Scan a directoy structure and list all the files in specified output file (e.g. FILELIST.TXT

  • MR.EXE 10K/???? * Memory View |shows what is current consuming system memory; I had a newer version that also reported CPU type, was similar to CheckIt

  • NUKE.EXE 7K/1990 * Nuke 1.0 |nuke all contents of a specified folder and recursively remove all subfolders) (safe to run with no command line arguments

  • PHONE.EXE 22K/1992 Phone Database |a later demo of using the OPRO library for a simple database entry system; a later version included the ability to attach and preview TIF images with entries

  • QMATH.EXE 7K/???? * QuickMath |command line math calculator, like "qmath 5.2+(4.8-3.5)*2"

  • REBOOT.EXE 3K/???? * Reboot the Systme from Command Line

  • SEARCH.EXE 6K/???? * Search for File |wildcards supported, recursively search specified folder; provides summary of total bytes used by all the found files

  • TERMINAL.EXE 11K/1991 (Simple) Terminal|my first attempt at a simple terminal connection program, and included Zmodem support

  • TEXTATTR.EXE 4K/1990 * Show all IBM PC text attributes|help remind what code is what effect

  • TIMEIS.EXE 5K/???? What Time Is It |writes the current time and date to DOS screen in plain-text, but this output cannot be pipped to a file

  • TSAR.EXE 7K/1992 Text Search and Replace|scan a text file and replace content based on command line arguments

  • XMIT.EXE 5K/???? Xmit Time |estimates file transfer times using command line arguments

"*" Entries that I consider to be the most useful utilities.