8-Bit Software Online Conversion

      Version 0.10 by Steven Flintham (15A) ChckMes is a simple program which will examine a file produced by the messaging system and attempt to correct the most common form of corruption. If the messaging system crashes the number of messages actually in the file may not agree with the message count stored in the file. ChckMes counts the actual number of messages and if it is different from the count stored in the file it will ask you if you want to change it to match. You should normally answer Y, for yes. The method used to count the number of messages is deliberately simple in order to avoid the risk of getting the count wrong, so it may take some time if the message file is long. ChckMes also gives a few possibly interesting statistics about the message file but you can feel free to ignore them if they don't make any sense or are of no interest. The only possible problem is if there are actually more than 25 messages in the message file. This is not allowed and so simply setting the count in the file to the true number of messages will not solve the problem. In this case you should load the messaging system, tidy the file and then recheck it. Everything should be OK after this. Technical details If you really want to know, this is why tidying the message file is necessary if there are more than 25 messages in the file. Obviously this should never occur in the first place but the whole point of ChckMes is that it attempts to solve problems caused by any bugs. ChckMes gives a warning and sets the message count to 25. The message file will appear to work correctly in the messaging system as that will ignore any messages after the first 25. However, if you delete a message there will then be only 24 messages in the file. Running ChckMes after deleting that message will again show a discrepancy between the number of actual messages in the file and the count stored in the file. This time there is no bug responsible for the error - the problem has arisen because the count is 24 (as it should be, since the messaging system only knew about the first 25 messages in the file) but Chckmes can see the extra messages at the end of the file. It will attempt to correct the message count and will succeed if there is now a total of 25 or less messages in the file, but if there are still more than 25 then the same problem will recur. Failing to tidy the file is not fatal but using ChckMes on the file will show another discrepancy as described above, which is misleading. PRESS BREAK