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General Information
Assigning Names to Directories and Drives:
It is possible to assign a name to a directory in the drive and dir list.
This can be achieved by defining in Standard Adjustments/Paths, for example:
c:\windows>Win95
Most commands that need some pathnames or filenames as arguments
accept this assigned name (here: Win95) as drivename.
Therefore you can enter, in the path gadget for example:
Win95
and you will be put to c:\windows.
You can access the file win.ini in the c:\windows directory by entering:
win95:\win.ini
This cuts some things short !
From version 2.10j PCOpus supports environment variables (type 'set' in DOS to get a list) and registry values.
Environment-variables are accessed by putting *ENV_ before the name, for example *ENV_windir for the windows
directory. The registry values can be accessed like in the {R} bracket: registrykey|name, just put *REG_ before the
key (*REG_registrykey|name)
This results in widely computer-independant configurations. The useability of these values and the assigned names
has been widened also and you may enter such a name for any path. Here are some examples to make it clear:
You can define this for your ASCII-Viewer:
*env_windir:\notepad.exe
but you could also use this:
*reg_HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion|SystemRoot:\notepad.exe
You could also define this as filetype-command for, say, .TXT files ...
PCOpus supports using the rundll32. You can define a button that calls any of these Win95-System-functions that open
one of those well known dialogs. Try this one for example, it opens the System-properties
*!winstandard rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL
Just define a button with an external command and enter the line above.
Using the mouse and mousebuttons/Drag-Drop
PCOpus makes use of nearly any combination of the mouse and the mousebuttons. Following is a list and the descriptions
for all possibilities in the directory windows:
- Pressing the left mousebutton over a directory entry selects or deselects this entry, depending on its former
state. Moving the mouse while the left button is pressed selects or deselects all entries the mouse passes over and
scrolls the directory window if necessary. The speed of this scrolling depends on the distance to the nearest entry.
It may happen that PCOpus refuses to let the user select some entries. This is not a bug, but a problem. It happens very
seldom and if it happens, it may help to either click on on of the sliders or double-clicking the right button. It may be that
you NEVER experience this problem, but if you do, you will have a quick solution ready now.
- Pressing the right mousebutton makes the window you are over to the source-window without selecting any files.
Holding and moving the mouse scrolls the directory window without changing the
state of selection of the entries it passes over. Holding the right button for a bit more than half a second and not moving the
mouse will show the user-definable pop-up-menu after releasing the button.
- Double-clicking the left mousebutton over a directory entry either enters the directory (if a directory was double-
clicked) or performs the action defined in the filetype-definition. This will normally be something
like displaying a text file, entering an archive, displaying a picture or something like this.
- Double-clicking the right mousebutton opens the drive-requester. This is a very fast and convenient way to
change drives or directories (see DriveChange for details).
- Pressing the left mousebutton, releasing it and pressing the right mousebutton within half a second is similar to
double-clicking the entry. Another command can be defined for this action (see filetype-definition
for details)
- Pressing the right mousebutton, releasing it and pressing the left mousebutton within half a second is
similar to
double-clicking the entry. Another command can be defined for this action (see filetype-definition
for details)
- Pressing both mousebuttons over some selected entries enters drag-drop-mode. It is a bit inconvenient to have to press both buttons for this,
but as you may see above, all other possibilities are used already. It is recommended to enter this mode by pressing the right button
slightly before pressing the left button, otherwise it may be possible that the entry you want to drag is
deselected instead. Also it is possbile that a wrong event occurs if you are clicking too fast. It is recommended that at least half a second passes
before starting a drag-drop operation. The following possibilities are supported by PCOpus:
- Dragging files to the destination window:
You will be asked if you want to copy all selected entries to the destination. You may do this or cancel
the operation.
- Dragging files onto a directory in the source-window:
You will be asked if you want to move all selected entries into this directory. You may do this or
cancel the operation.
- Dragging files onto an archive:
You will be asked if you want to add all selected files to this archive. PCOpus will try to identify the type of the
archive and use the correct archiver, if you click on 'Yes'. If you click on 'No' and you dragged the entries to the destination window, you may still want
to copy these files. See above for details. Clicking 'Cancel' cancels this operation completely.
You can only add files to an archive that is NOT SELECTED !
Releasing the buttons somewhere else results in no action. So if you entered drag-drop-mode accidently, you may just simply stop pressing the buttons and
nothing happens.
The Standard Requester
PCOpus uses an internal standard requester for error reports, rename, makedir, etc.
Well, nearly everything is done with this requester.
When you have to enter something into the (lower) text-gadget, you can use
- F1 and F2 accompanied by Shift to select the files from the directory window.
- F1 without Shift adds the first/next selected entry from the ACTIVE side to the gadget
- F1 with Shift adds the first/next entry (if selected or not) from the ACTIVE side to the gadget
- F2 without Shift adds then first/next selected entry from the INACTIVE side to the gadget
- F2 with Shift adds the first/next entry (if selected ot not) from the INACTIVE side to the gadget
You may search through all entries by pressing the keys more than one time.
You may find this useful perhaps.
Supported Filetypes:
- ARJ Archives
Archives created by the archiver ARJ.
From version 2.60 ARJ supports long filenames.
PCOpus can unpack ARJ archives by using the OPUSunp.dll.
Get the latest version of ARJ from http://www.ARJSOFT.com
- JAR Archives
Archives created by the archiver JAR.
This is the new archiver from ARJ-Software, with really good compression ratios.
Unfortunately the structure of JAR archives is a real mystery to me. As long as R.Jung
does not supply the structure of JAR archives, PCOpus uses the JAR lt command to create
a file-list in the temporary directory and reads the archive contents from this file.
This is really slow, but it works, what is the main thing.
Get the latest version from http://www.ARJSOFT.com
- ACE Archives
Archives created by the archiver ACE.
This is a new archiver. It supports solid archives. Quite a good one, too.
The Unace.dll is supported and included.
Get the latest version from http://members.aol.com/mlemke6413/ace
- ZIP Archives
Well known on PC platforms should be ZIP files.
Files MUST end in 'ZIP' and must be ZIP-Archives.
Please take care that PKZIP and PKUNZIP can only handle 8+3 DOS
names. If you want to extract files from the archives all names are
shortened to 8+3 by PKUNZIP. Use WinZIP if you need full support for
long filenames.
The Unzip32.dll from Info-Zip can be used now. Alternatively the OPUSunp.dll can be used to extract from
ZIP archives.
If the use of the DLL is not explicitely forbidden in Standard adjustments/Archive,
ZIP extraction is really fast and supports long filenames, too.
- RAR Archives
The 'Russian Archiver' is on the best way to become the standard archiver. It is unsurpassed in
compression ratio (and compression time :-))
PCOpus can use the unrar.dll from E.Roshal now.
- LHA/LZH Archives
A very old Archiver, mostly used on Amiga, I think, is LHA and its predecessors.
PCOpus can use the OPUSunp.dll to extract from LHA/LZH archives.
- D64 Disk Images
The Commodore 64 diskimage files, introduced by Miha Peternel, creator of C64S.
Files MUST end in 'D64', everything
is treated as D64 file then. Please note, that the output will be
quite strange if the file is not a real D64 diskimage.
Renaming
of the files inside the diskimage is possible. Please use only backup-copies of
your diskimages. Not that the routine is buggy, but if you changed
names and forgot the original name it is easily possible, that
the C64 programs won't run. Click on the standard Rename button
to rename files.
- T64 Tape archives
The Commodore 64 tape-archives, introduced by Miha Peternel, creator of C64S.
Renaming of files inside an archive is possible.
Please note that there are many T64 archives with wrong filelengths.
The files will always be as long as stated in the header inside the archive.
Output files are either filled with 0-Bytes or truncated.
These wrong files always have the end-address $C3C6, resulting in a filelength of 48071 bytes.
This is due to buggy adders, no PCOpus bug !!!
- CAB Archives
Micros*ft cabinet files. You know them.
Files must end in 'CAB' and must begin with 'MSCF' inside the file.
CAB files have some restrictions compared to normal archives.
The 'extract.exe' must be in your path. 'Extract.exe' does not
support extracting of complete directories, at least as far as I
know. Therefore you can only extract single files (of course
more than one at once), but no directories. If you need to extract
all files from a CAB file, including all subdirs, define a button
with an external command like:
path\extract.exe /Y /L {d} /E {f}
Please check the command line options of extract before defining
a button.
We have come across some CAB-files that are NOT compatible to standard CAB-Files.
We will implement support for them on request.
- ISO Images
ISO9660 CD-Image files
Mode 1 and Mode 2 (XA) is supported.
Since Mode 2 is quite strange (304 unused bytes ?) and the structure
is a bit different to Mode 1, files from Mode 2 images are copied with
a chunksize of 2048. This results in fairly longer times to copy files.
PCOpus is the first program to do this under Win95 as far as I know.
If you set the ISO-Offset to 8, you can use WinOnCD BIN images, too.
You MUST rename the BIN images to .ISO or .BIN.ISO, though !
- FCD Images
Fast CD Personal Edition v1.0 uncompressed image files.
See ISO Images for details
- CP Backup .DIR files
The catalog-files of PCTools backups. The contents can be viewed
- Z-Archives
These archives are created by the InstallShield File Compressor utility by Stirling Technologies. To create archives or extract from
these archives, you need a file called 'ICOMP.EXE' in your path. Z files do not necessarily end in '.Z', I have seen many other
suffixes, like '.1', '.2', '.3' ...., '.lib' etc. A working byte-recognition code for filetype definition:
#0-13,1-5d,2-65,3-8c,4-3a,5-01,6-02: Z-Archives
There are some limitations for these kind of archives, though. Anyway, better
a non-perfect support for these archives than none at all :-)
- I5C-Archives
These archives are created by the InstallShield5 File Compressor utility by Stirling Technologies. To access archives or extract from
these archives, you need a file called 'I5COMP.EXE' in your path. I5C files usually end in '.CAB', do not confuse them with
standard CAB-files. PCOpus will automatically recognize these archives if you define a filetype for them like this:
#0-49,1-53,2-63,3-28,4-0,5-51,6-0: I5C-Archives
There are some limitations for these kind of archives, again, especially adding and creating, which is not possible currently.
- TAR-Archives
TAR archives are well known on Unix-Systems. TAR is derived from 'Tape ARchiver'. TAR usually can read
and write from and to tape devices (streamers). Well, merely any device that supports streams of data
being written to it in a given blocksize. PCOpus can NOT read or write from and to such devices. It could perhaps
be implemented, we just need a person that wants to try it out :-). PCOpus supports TAR-archive files only.
These files have the suffix '.TAR' normally. PCOpus needs an executable named TAR.EXE in the path. A version of
GNU Tar is preferred, but any compatible version should do. We use TAR.EXE to read the contents because
the filesizes given inside the archive are not as expected somehow. Perhaps somebody can send us information
on how to read filesizes of files inside TAR archives correctly. Please note: TAR currently supports only short
names, there is no way to determine if the file is a TAR-archive except the suffix and PCOpus does not support
.tar.gz files currently.
- WAD-Archives
Should be well known from DOOM. In this category of files fall the following: DOOM and DOOM2 WAD files, Duke Nukem 3D GRP files,
Tombraider 3 cdaudio.wad file, Quake PAK files and an additional WAD file (WAD2), Dungeon Keeper 2 WAD files, Outcast PAK files
(compressed files can not be unpacked), DarkStone MTF files, Hidden&Dangerous DTA files and Nocturne POD files. All of these seem to be
uncompressed formats, so we had no problems in using already existing routines.
You may access any file inside these archives without having to use of an external program. PAK files do not support subdirectories. So you may only
access files inside subdirs directly, not the directories themselves.
If you want other formats supported, just EMail !
The whole archive support was programmed without a single line of
documentation. So it is easily possible that you stumble over an
archive file that is not correctly read. Please send an EMail with
an exact description of the problem to msiegris@student.uni-kl.de
If there is an urgent need for support of any other archive-type, I will
try to implement them on request.
NOTE 1: PCOpus can use Info-Zips unzip32.dll. Info-ZIP's software (Zip,
UnZip and related utilities) is free and can be obtained
as source code or executables from Internet/WWW sites,
including http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/
NOTE 2: PCOpus can use E.Roshals unrar.dll that comes with WinRAR.
NOTE 3: PCOpus can use unACE.dll as released by the programmer of ACE
NOTE 4: PCOpus can use unpack.dll 32Bit version from C. Ghisler. On request from the programmer the DLL has been renamed to
OPUSunp.dll to avoid possible conflicts.
The unavoidable ... :-)
- Special thanks must go to Hander for many useful hints and
bug-reports. Also many thanks for the first steps with the PCOpus.dll
- Also to Access for intensive bug-testing with completely senseless actions
and useful ideas.
- Thanks to Tarkus for intensive testing and useful hints (better ?)
- Thanks to Mjoelnir for testing and ideas.
- Thanks to _Smurf_ for bugreports.
- Thanks to Mike Mechanic for useful hints
- Thanks to Klaus Mandola for the homepage.
- Thanks to Sito for spreading this program far and wide
- Thanks to Eugene Roshal for useful hints on unrar.dll
- Thanks to Mike Le Voi for unzip32.dll support source-code
- Thanks to Greg Roelofs for his patience (Hope you changed the readme by now :-)
- Thanks to C.Ghisler for many, many useful hints and the 32Bit unpack.dll/OPUSunp.dll
- Thanks to Unknown Man for help on cab32.dll and the DLL itself
- Thanks to Mok for some useful hints
- Thanks to Marcel Lemke (ACE) for help with the UnACE.DLL
- Thanks to all guys who overwhelmed us with (positive :-)) feedback within
only hours after PCOpus was present on www.windows95.com !
- Thanks to all people who registered PCOpus
- Thanks to all people that send some hints and bugreports, keep on !
- Thanks to all people who deserve it and I forgot to mention :-)
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