
                                  Welcome

                           "Soon we shall gold-dusted snapdragon
                            Sweet William with his homely cottage smell"
                                           Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888

What is Gold?

          TJ Software has been developing Pascal toolkits for ten years.
     Gold represents an effort to embody all the best features of our
     successful TTT and TOT in a single procedural toolkit. Gold is
     designed to provide easy to implement procedures which free you
     from the more tedious and repetitive programming chores, such as
     windows, menus, full screen input, string formatting, date
     management, ... you get the idea! The full value of Gold is not
     limited to saving you time -- the final program will have a
     consistent, easy to use interface, and will lend a very
     professional quality to your work. If you want to transform your
     dusty old DOS programs into state-of-the-art text mode applications
     with features you might expect to find in the best DOS programs
     today, just read on. Gold includes the entire source code,
     including the ASM routines used for screen writing. Many schools
     and colleges have used our products as educational material for
     student programmers. If you like a feature in Gold, all you have to
     do is look at the source code to see how it's done. The quickest
     way to gain an appreciation of the capabilities of Gold is to
     execute the program GOLDDEMO.EXE. This program demonstrates some of
     the more visible procedures and functions available. The demo
     itself was, of course, written with the toolkit. If you haven't yet
     run it, do so now.

How to Use Gold

          The documentation assumes that you have a basic knowledge of
     Borland's Turbo Pascal and understand the structured programming
     tenets of procedures, functions and units. One of the best ways to
     learn how to take advantage of Gold is by example. We have included
     over one hundred example demo files to speed your learning. Chapter
     2 provides some guidance on which demos to run first. As a quick
     primer, here is an example of how to display a pop-up message in a
     dialog box with an interactive OK button (as shown in Figure 1.1).

Required Hardware & Software

          Gold is designed to work with versions 6 and 7 of
     Turbo/Borland Pascal in both real and protected modes. Programs
     developed with Gold will function on the same hardware as specified
     in the Turbo Pascal compiler documentation. Any of the standard
     display adapters are supported, including monochrome, CGA, EGA and
     VGA. Applications built with Gold automatically support a Microsoft
     (or true compatible) mouse. Although it appears that Gold will
     function with version 5.5 of Pascal, we have not thoroughly tested
     it on this platform, and we do recommend that any 5.5 programmers
     seriously consider upgrading. We think it's well worth it.

Royalties

    The following text is extracted from the User's Guide, and only
    applies to the registered version:

              "Many Gold users develop commercial programs specifically
               to sell for profit. TJ Software, Inc., neither expects
               nor requires a royalty fee on such programs. The major
               restriction is that you may not develop a program that is
               itself a toolkit. In addition, neither the toolkit source
               code nor the compiled units may be distributed or sold as
               part of another product. If you have not registered your
               copy of Gold, you may not develop programs for sale or
               distribution. Refer to the license agreement at the front
               of this manual for our definitive statement on royalties
               and warranties."

    Users of the Shareware version of the product may NOT distribute
    any executable files created with GOLD. If you want to create EXE's
    with Gold for sale or for any form of distribution, you must register
    your copy of GOLD.

Support

          TJ Software, Inc., strives to support its users. If you have a
     problem that you are unable to resolve: Send an Email and upload
     your programs to our support BBS at (409) 737-1705. Use cyberspace
     to send your problem details to our Compuserve address at
     74017,227. Send a diskette containing the problematic software,
     together with details of the program and instructions on how to
     generate the problem to:

                      TJ Software, Inc.
                      6212 Sea Isle, Suite 300
                      Galveston TX 77554

     Fax pertinent details to us at (409) 737-5458.

          We regret that we cannot offer continued telephone support and
     still provide toolkits at such low registration fees. Feedback from
     our customer base indicated a preference to keep prices down and
     support problems electronically.

          Give Us Your Feedback! Our toolkits are as good as they are
     thanks to the feedback from many, many users. We encourage you to
     send us any suggestions, code fragments and ideas that you may have
     which could improve the product. Many thanks to our long-standing
     customers for helping to make Gold as good as it is.
