THE USUAL FLYING START

I thought I'd get the jump on things and look into the finer points of programming applications to run on a ProLine BBS, to which end I broke out the 350+ page manual... imagine my joy at finding the "programming commands" section is completely missing not only from my print copy, but also from the original PDF file! Wonderful.

While most of what I hope to accomplish should be relatively simple, there are one or two things that may require a little creative noodle work... the first challenge I came across was how to let your program know who's using it. I'm sure there's a very straightforward way to find out who's currently logged on, but several hours of staring at ProLine's highly optimized source code left me no wiser.

As it happens the solution turned out to be a problem in it's own right: in trying out my existing Hangman game under ProLine I inadvertently discovered that a program with no special error handling routine will allow the user to gain full control of the board -- Crashing a program leaves you with an AppleSoft BASIC prompt and full access to the file system... it also clued me in to the fact that entering the ProDOS "prefix" command gives you the current user's home directory pathname, which very handily includes the user's name right at the end, thus:

/PROLINE/USR/NAME/

So problem #1 solved with a lesson in BBS security thrown in for good measure. So far, so good.