is a topic which gets brought up relatively often. as a recent returnee(back for a couple weeks now) i have tried every helper i could find. and ive read the topics about which helper or combo of helpers is best. ive gone with twsproxy/attac because it is totally free. the attac scripts are cycle limited, but its got a graphic map... and twsproxy runs all the scripts you need. why is this combo so frowned upon? i shouid also add that my primary goal when getting back into this was to spend no money booger is a cheap bastige

zoc 4.15 is also free....with this combo you get rev helper scirpts also free. In addition you get a nice screen size and keyboard mapping for macro's.

Attac is not free at this time. For a pay helper Swath has support and ongoing updates.

Attac is dead for the most part as few use it and the web site is down or was. But whatever works for you and helps you enjoy the game is fine. Some guys still use Procomm + etc as this was the scripting language they learned years ago. Twx is the important component in the package and that is free and open source.

i think the cycle crippled attac is free, the cycle crippled swath is 30 days only... i will check out this ZOC thanx though the twx program seems to do it all...

if you can do w/o the graphic map, any old telnet prog (putty, zoc, etc) will do just fine w/ twxproxy.

Trade War Assistant (twassist) is free and has a very good graphic map. It wont work for more than 5K sectors, unfortunately.
http://web.archive.org/web/200503060828 ... WAST23.ZIP
It needs minor tweaking to read twgs cim output, if you want to try it I'll post the method.

Zoc is free to a point, you have to deal with an anoying beeping/message after the 30/60 day trial is up. 4.XX version is better then the 5.xx and above. I belive rev has updated his scripts to work the current version of Zoc. The version you d/l (atleast till 5.0) is not restricted in anyway that I know of. I use the Zoc/TWXproxy combo and it works for me, I didnt care for swath but I never used it past the trial period. Screen size didnt work for me, Zoc has a bigger display I belive it will go up to a 17-18 size. Maybe the newer ones go bigger IDK I use 4.15 now. Hope this kind of helped.

I use Zoc/Twx also.. [never hear any beeps either (;]

I used Swath sometimes for tournys or for bubble lists.