Blumenthal Software

Warning: The following advice still holds, but Windows is getting very hostile to DOS programs. PBS3's days are numbered. Please familiarize yourself with PBSW2 so that if you have to make a switch some day, it will not be on an emergency basis.

In order to move PBS (DOS) to a new machine:

1. Reinstalling and copying the data files is a very bad method. You can do it, but I do not advise it. Using XCOPY to copy the data files to floppy disks is better than using COPY, but it still is not good, because even XCopy might miss some files.
2. Best is to copy from one machine to the other with a cable and a program designed to do just that. FastMove, Laplink, and PCAnywhere are three programs that do that; they come with a cable, and with software that will work in DOS, and in Windows 31, 95, 98, and NT. There is another program called MoveIt (I think) that also does Windows programs, but I am not familiar with it. Windows 95 has built-in software to copy from one machine to another, but I don't feel comfortable with it, and in any case, you have to have two machines running win95 and buy your own cable.
3. You can make a backup and then restore it, but this has big problems. Unless you are using a backup program that works on both machines, the backups you make on the old machine may not be usable by the software on the new machine. In particular, Microsoft's backup programs change with each new version of Windows or DOS, and it is not easy to use an old backup created with Microsoft Backup. If this is what you want to do, you probably will need a computer person to do the sweating and experimenting needed to do it. I've tried to do it and had many frustrating hours.
4. Still on backup and restore: if you have an external tape drive that will work on both machines, with software that will work on both machines, then that may also be an ideal method. Or if you can make a CD on one machine that will be readable on the other, that, too would be good (but make sure that your cd software does not mark your data files as read-only).

You should transfer ALL the files in the PBS directory, INCLUDING the subdirectories (fg and storage).

If you have no other way to do it, and must use floppies to carry the program from one machine to the next, I suggest you get a program called pkzip (widely available on the net), and use the following command:

pkzip a:myfiles c:\pbs3\*.* -& -r

This should create a set of files on floppies, which you can then unzip onto the new machine's hard drive. There are many other ZIP utilities, like WinZip for Windows, that will do the same thing, although the syntax will be different.

PBS DOS and error 200 on Fast Computers

There is a bug in the libraries that I used to create PBS3 for DOS; this bug shows up only on some fast machines; as soon as pbs3 is started, you get an error 200 and it stops. There is no internal fix as of now. However, you can use a utility program called MoSlow, available for download from http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/. This program has been reported to me by several pbs3 users to fix the error 200 problem.

PBS DOS and error 9901 with Windows ME

Windows ME (and perhaps some other Windows versions) no longer look at the config.sys file in the root directory; a line that says FILES=100 in the config.sys will therefore be ignored. (In Windows NT there is no config.sys,but there is a config.nt, which you should modify similarly to config.sys.) If you get the 9901 error under windows ME, you will need to edit the system.ini file in the windows directory, and under the [386Enh] section enter the following line:

PerVMFiles=100

Reboot, and you should be able to run PBS3. It might be necessary to increase the number in the PerVMFiles line from 100 to a maximum of 230, depending on what other DOS programs you run simultaneously.

Running PBS3 under Windows

Once you have dealt with the above problems, you should consider the following:

• First create a windows shortcut to pbs3: find pbs3 withWindows Explorer; right click and drag pbs3.exe to the desktop, and select the menu choice to create a shortcut.
• I prefer to work in a window rather than full screen. Right click the shortcut icon, select properties, and in the Screen page select Usage=Window.
• Change the Font in the shortcut properties as you prefer. Fonts differ from one version of Windows to another. I used to recommend 8x16, but I don't have that on my new machine.
• Memory: I have found (so far) that leaving the settings at Auto works best in most situations.
• Program: Make sure that the Working field is set to the folder where pbs3.exe is located (e.g. c:\pbs3) Also, if you need to use the "lowram" parameter when starting pbs3, enter it in the Command line field, which would then read (for example) "c:\pbs3\pbs3.exe lowram".

DOS Shell: This will not work under Windows. However, Windows itself will provide you with the same capability. All you need do is click on Windows' Start button, Programs, and find the MSDOS prompt in the menu. Click on that, change directory to the pbs3 directory, and you can work just as you did with pbs3's DOS shell, with the added advantage of being able to run both pbs3 and the DOS window at the same time. If you wish, you can find command.com in the Windows directory and create a shortcut to it on your desktop to avoid going through the Start menu steps.

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