OK- Promise this is the last ATDT update for a bit! Work on the new ATA Project revealed some significant issues behind the scenes in the DOS Door code.
Two things you will actually notice, and a pile you will not.
The cursor. A caller wrote in to say the cursor didn't blink at the prompt the way it did on the main menu. He was being generous. Outside a typing field there was no cursor at all, and the main menu only appeared to have one where the art happened to paint a blinking cell. Every hotkey prompt on the board now keeps a proper blinking underscore: menus, pause lines, pagers, the whole logon tour. It is drawn over the screen rather than into it, so art underneath survives untouched.
The logon tour is yours. The cards between the password and the main menu (welcome screen, unread bulletins, auto-message, rumor, last ten callers) always ran in one fixed order. Now you arrange them, or switch any of them off, or switch all of them off and drop callers straight at the main menu. Boards that never touch the setting run the classic order, unchanged.
Under the DOS door engine, a season of actually running a DOS board on
this thing paid off five debts. The two worth naming: a door that hung up
on its caller used to go unnoticed for as long as twenty seconds, and a
big file loading over a slow host could drown its own transfer in
duplicate reads and crash the game. Both fixed. Door manifests also take
path globs now, so DATA/SAVE*.* pins one directory.
No database changes at all this time. Overlay the files and you are done.
You just read issue #6 of ATDT BBS . You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.