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           Ûß\  ÛßÝ     ÛßÝ Ûß\ Û\\     Digital Entropy BBStro v1.1
           Û Þ  Þ-      Û   Û Û ÛÞÞ  -              by
           ÛÜÛ  ÛÜÛ  Ü  ÛÜÛ ÛÜÛ Û Þ          The Unlord/Xylem
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-Why?
        This little program (1996 bytes!) was made by specific request of
Loki/Xylem the awesome SysOp of Digital Entropy BBS.  Late last January when
he had first hatched the idea of setting up a demo oriented board he asked
me if I'd be interested in writing the much needed loader for the BBS. I told
him that (of coz) I'd be glad to make such a program for him and did a
minimal amount of work on it.  Them my hard drive took a turn for the worse
and I ended up hacking an older version of it that I'd given him.  Needless
to say, that was just the beginning of my problems.  Loki, getting impatient,
put the board up w/o a loader.  I did a little work on it every once in a
while when he pestered me but I had a job and a girlfriend so I found lots of
ways to spend my time that wasn't doing the loader.  However, come August, I
stopped work and my girlfriend moved so the loader got finished.

-What?
        A lot of time went into this loader mainly because I wouldn't settle
for having it anything but 1996 bytes (thanks PSI).  It includes some of the
following:

        * a random number generator
        * 464 byte "DE" grafic (optomized to the max)
        * a fixed point math fade in (all the colors get there at once)
        * 1023 stars in the 2-d starfield
        * 1920 dots per frame!
        * 371 bytes of encrypted text

The loader is primarly optomized for size although I tried to make it as fast
as I could.  No postcompilers or compression utilities were used to get it
this small.  Just one 20k asm file compiled under tasm 3.1 and tlink 5.1.  I
had not planned on releasing the source but if anyone has any questions about
it I would be glad to answer them.  I can be reached at regge@erols.com or
better yet just call the board and post on the coding message sub.  Oh yeah,
I'd almost forgotten, there are two hidden parts in the loader.  Just to make
it easy I'll tell ya all about them here:

        * debug mode- if you type "de/d" or "de d" the loader will run with
                      a vertical retrace cpu tester so you can see how much
                      of the processor these routines use.
        * extra info- if you use the dos command "type" on the file instead
                      of it spitting out garbage it will actually tell you
                      some useful version info.

That's about it.  Loki has already informed me that my mission isn't over by
a long shot.  He wants me to make him a second loader that has some music in
it from our awesome musician Zoner, so keep a look out for xlm_de2.zip.

-Who?
        Xylem is a Northern Virginia demo group.  For more info check the
xylem11.nfo that came with this archive!

                                                       Signed,
                                                       The Unlord/Xylem