TWHelper was what I considered by far, the best tw helper in its day. Unfortunately and predictably, its for dos. I downloaded TCP-Com and I was able to get twhelp to connect on virtual com3 (avoiding the real first two com ports) and of course default irq 4. TWHelp could connect! But was slow.

And then yesterday I ran across some dinky program called TAMEDos which apparently allows these old 8 bit programs to function better. Now TWHelp functions reasonably speedily. woot!

I'm very happy about this. I was wondering if anyone has found anyway to tinker with TWHelp to solve some of its quirks like when it clears busts or its limit to 5000 sectors.

Truly TWHelp still one of the great helpers still of today, with some minor defects should be accessable to even the new players as it is only a helper to ease gameplay, and doesn't run noninteractive kill scripts and their ilk that has gummed up the game.

Also I have been trying to get the /U mapper command to work, does anyone have any advice? Thanks!

http://www.filelibrary.com:8080/cgi-bin/freedownload/DOS/r/86/twhelp90.zip

Anyone ever try to get this working under DOSbox? It has very good
DOS emulation, might make visual stuff easier.

There may be some people who can help you with this, or you can simply use one of the numerous helpers that have all of these functions already present. If you don't like the interactive kill scripts, simply don't use those options.

I never said anything about interactive kill scripts.

Who are the people who can help me? The functions in twhelper are vastly superior in the ways it gives you access to information. Other helpers like SWATH and ATTAC do an average job getting the same info out and often in some klunky windows ways. And even then, ATTAC seems to have some severe problems with simply scripts like hauling and colonizing. Neither even have transwarp trading if you can believe that. So feel free to point me to the "numerous helpers" that contain all the functions. I've already paid for SWATH and ATTAC and feel they are pretty incomplete by 1994 standards (but surely I can reinvent the wheel by writing personal scripts for them).

What’s Transwarp trading and why would I want to use it?

Like Port pair trading, but ports are not ADJ. So you have to use some fuel to twarp to the other port (and by doing that, lessening the holds on your ship to make money)? Maybe?

Transwarp trading has gone out of style problably due to the predominance of 20,000 sector games it seems, but in the days where paired port access was limited, either due to a small universe size or a large amount of blues playing, you can do paired trading between nonadjacent ports as long as one of them sold you ore to fuel your transwarp drive. You lose a little bit of efficiency by purchasing small quantities of ore and trading slightly less organics and equipment but transwarp trading was certainly advantagous in these situations.

When I registered SWATH a few years ago, transwarp trading was definately in the helper and I just checked it a few weeks ago and I was told they didn't have the feature anymore and then took it off the _feature list on their website_. So believe it or not, some of these helper programs are losing features over time, not gaining.

but there is no reason to have it. Even in a 5000 sector game, there is no need to use this "feature". It's not cost effective if you are blue doing port trading. If you are playing in a turns game, you want to maximize the amount you make EVERY turn, and if you are taking say 12 holds every jump for fuel, you're losing out on a ton of cash.

Editing this post cause I did think of one place where it would be good to do this I guess. If you have a game with low port density. I use to play a game on an Alaskan TWGS that banged a 10k sector game with 40% port density all the time...made it very hard to find pair ports adj. So I GUESS it would be usefull in that case, but you can just as easy just macro warp with the buying the fuel everytime, and just use the helpers haggle routine to get the best money for your equip/orgs.

(I miss that game, Bourlis twgs or something like that. It was a very hard game, and usually had a decent amount of players in it...oh well, in the past)

I've been in plenty of 5000 sector games, most with standard 40% port densities where paired ports are drained with in a week of bang. Sure you could spend turns looking for the odd ones missed but that's not efficient either. Transwarp trade, get some eprobes and maybe the next day you'd find untapped paired port after some probes.

I admit I'm a bit biased because I grew up playing 250 turn per day games but it does not seem like a completely obsolete feature.

Hey Coke you read Asimov books? ( The Foundation) he has a whole series on the Foundatioin, I know I have read them all. Just kidding about your The Foundation, but seriously have you read any of them?

Vulcan

There are very few circumstances where you should have someone still pair trading 1 week into the game.

The thing is people have found better ways of making cash in games if your playing a turn game and your blue twarp trading then you need to do some reading up on the game because the next person is going to come in play as red and sst way more cash then you could ever make using less turns per trade. You could easily write a macro to twarp trade if you really wanted to and save it to your macro list in SWATH then change the sectors numbers and amount of ore it bought every time you use it and your set.

You should read [url="www.tw-cabal.com/index.html"]The Cabal's Secret Hideout[/url] the information listed there is not just for scripters it works the same way if you don’t script and play by hand or use macros. Just knowing this information will help you to get a better handle on what you should do to maximize the cash you make and minimize the amount of turns you use doing it.

This game it about strategy it does not mater if you use scripts or play by hand if you don’t know the mechanics of the game your going to fall behind and lose to your opponent who does know the mechanics it’s really that simple.

I honestly hope you can get your TWHelp up and working if you like the way it displays information then great for you use it to do what you need it to do. I feel SWATH and the TWX scripts I have do a wonderful job of data mining and presenting it to me in a fast and usable manner but again that’s only my preference.

Stretch, sounds like FUN! So if I were to ay999^Mf1^mc would you fuse?

harley and Speed summed it up.

Vulcan, Can't say I have. Never heard of the guy till I googled him. Talk to Stockton about our name, he came up with it.

quote:There are very few circumstances where you should have someone still pair trading 1 week into the game.
Assuming you aren't podded by the end of week 1, and you've colonized your planets to the minimum requirements, what does a blue do to make money if it is not paired port trading? I've read all the Cabal documentation and I'm not sure you'd be a position to do any other types of cashing methods. Anyone care to enlighten?