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|A |6Picture This |A ^1Electronic Christmas Card |Aͺ |6Picture This |A
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^Cby
^CJohn Allen, Jr.

   It's that time of year when you're probably getting ready to send holiday
greetings to your friends.  You could use ordinary paper cards, a form which
was popularized in the 19th century.  Or, you could head towards the 21st
century by sending your PC-owning acquaintances a computerized greeting, using
this program.

   Just run it: it's fully menu-driven.  Use the menus to select the pictures,
sounds, and messages for your personal card.

   When you pick the option to choose the scenes, Electronic Christmas Card
will give you a choice of several scenes you can place into your card.  Choose
one or all; whether you want a manger scene or some fully-secular winter fun,
there's a picture for you.  Now, use another menu item to choose the music to
go with your pictures: Away In A Manger, Deck The Halls, Winter Wonderland,
and others are available.  Pick one song to go with each picture you have
chosen for your card.

   Several of these pictures provide room for a personal message of your own,
which you can input using the appropriate menu item.  The number of letters is
limited (and varies depending on which picture it is); if it starts beeping
as you're typing the message, that means you've added too many letters and
should backspace.  Some screens allow more than one line; try pressing ENTER and 
typing some more.  Press ESC when you're done.

   There's a menu item to look at the card you've created, and another to save
it when you're done.  When you use the SAVE option, insert a blank, formatted
disk (which you should have created previously by using the FORMAT command at
the DOS prompt), and your card will be written as an executable program which
can be run by itself even by users who don't have this issue of BIG BLUE DISK.  
Note: you need to keep the program disk in your drive as well while the save is 
taking place, since the program needs access to its files.  See below for hints 
on how to accomplish this under several different system configurations.

   The card disk you just created can be copied and sent to friends, who can
run the card by typing "AUTOEXEC" from the DOS prompt with the disk in their
drive.  You can make the disk self-booting by formatting it with the command:

^C^1FORMAT A: /S

instead of just "FORMAT A:".  This causes DOS to be added to the disk so you can
just put it in your drive, power up, and the card will pop up automatically.
(Please note that distributing disks with DOS on them is illegal; Microsoft owns
copyright on MS-DOS and has not licensed its distribution except by computer
manufacturers.  They probably won't sue you if you put DOS on a bootable
Christmas card disk to give your friends, but any such use is at your own risk;
we don't advocate any violation of copyright law.)

   Dual-drive users should insert the blank disk in the drive other than the one 
from which the program is being run (temporarily removing the DOS master disk, 
if it's already in that drive, while the card saving is taking place).  Hard 
drive users are best off copying this program to their hard disk and running it 
from there, which frees up the floppy drive to insert the blank disk.  Single-
drive users have it more difficult; your best bet there is to copy this program 
to a blank disk of your own, run it from that disk, create your saved card on 
the same disk, then copy the files AUTOEXEC.BAT, VIEW.COM, and VIEW.TXT to a 
second blank disk which you can then copy and distribute as your card. 

   In all cases, when prompted for the drive letter to write the card to, give 
it the letter of the drive into which you have inserted the disk that the card 
will be saved onto.  Hence, a dual-drive user who's running BIG BLUE DISK from 
drive B will insert a blank, formatted disk in drive A, and type the letter A, 
when prompted.

   To run this program outside the BIG BLUE DISK menu, type: ^1CARD^0.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES:
^FCARD.COM
^FLETTERS.DAT
^FVIEW.TXT
^FSNOW.DRW
^FANGEL.DRW
^FMANGER.DRW
^FTREE.DRW
^FHOLLY.DRW
