Would appreciate assistance from any of you guys who've been using WIndows
XP Home.  I recently started using the latest, in my personal view,
headache from Micro$oft.  First I found out that pkzip/pkunzip could no
longer handle long filenames.  So, I have to get used to using Winzip's
command line program for any archives that do or might use long filenames
on my new system.  ARJ is also unable to handle long filenames under XP or
any other NT-based o/s, according to its docs. Zilch about long filenames
in the docs for the RAR program, so I don't know if it does or does not
work properly with long filenames under XP.

Second irritation was finding that XP launches some dos apps, including all
of the Lord igms that I run on my local-mode testing game, in a partial
size window.  Which does not give you any obvious way to get it to be the
same window size as the normal dos prompt is, using XP's cmd.exe program. 
Some one told me to try right clicking the left icon and changing Fonts to
Terminal 14, but I've not tried that yet.  And don't know if it would work
as a result.  I did try running one of my dos apps in Full Screen mode. 
The cursor started acting cuckoo after I returned to the DOS prompt.  So I
had to close the window and reopen it.

So have any of you found any good solutions to problems like that with XP,
especially in regard to being able to see the Lord programs one runs in a
normal size window?  Thanks, Donald.

BTW, status report on my Lord programming work.  Still somewhat on
vacation. Am catching up on friend's waterfall sites - looking at
waterfalls is MUCH more enjoyable than looking at a pascal compiler
.

Lord Gambling Casino 2.03 beta.  Is recompiled under the XP system, and I
will probably re-release it publicly in a few more days.

Gem Trader v2.17 beta.  Changed the igm to allow adoptions until the player
is over 2,000 kids. Then it denies the adoption - player is refunded the
gems price.  No one has told me to date whether they want the May adopt
limit to be sysop-configurable, so for now, it will remain hard-coded. 
Anyway, Gem Trader needs a little more tweaking I think, then it will be
released as v2.20.  I have not had any luck thinking of how to do the
"Sexy Samantha" storyline for the igm, so that igm update is on
hold.

The rest of my apps are early July compilations.  Have permission to work
on Turgeon's House now for Mike Ciesiensky, who's too busy to take care of
its next update himself.  So will have a beta of that igm sometime in the
next few weeks for people to play with.  First one will be fairly simple,
and allow players to see their game stats while they are in the igm.  If
anyone has any problems running the v3.00 igm, be sure to let me know, and
I'll see about fixing them. Donald.

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag-5