ProBoard now supports AVATAR terminal emulation. It allows users to select either AVATAR/0 or AVATAR/0+, providing that the terminal package they use to call your BBS is compatible with either AVATAR/0 and/or AVATAR/0+. Examples of terminal software packages that support AVATAR/0+ are, FrontDoor 2.02 and TinyTerm. QModem and Telix also support AVATAR, but only in the AVATAR/0 mode. AVATAR has the advantage over ANSI of being much faster.

A word about the files extensions (.A??) that are used for AVATAR screens. There are two file extensions that are associated with AVATAR text files that you will display to your users. They are .AVT and .AVP. When displaying (.A??) textfiles to your users, ProBoard looks for them in the following order.

   1.) .AVP
   2.) .AVT
   3.) .ANS
   4.) .ASC

Refer to the following section on “Hard Coded .A?? files” for more information on the default .A?? files that ProBoard will display to your users.

To create files with the .AVT and .AVP file extensions you will need a file utility called AVTCONV.EXE. This file was distributed with RemoteAccess, and is also available from most of the ProBoard beta sites, as well as any of the ProBoard Support BBS's. It is very simple to use this utility. Just copy it to your ProBoard TEXTFILE directory and run the following commands:

AVTCONV *.ANS AVT       -- this will create a copy of all of your ANSI
                        (.ANS) screens with the extension .AVT These are
                        the textfiles for displaying to users that have
                        AVATAR/0 terminal emulation selected.
AVTCONV /C+ *.ANS AVP   -- this will create a copy of all of your ANSI
                        (.ANS) screens with the extension .AVP These are
                        the textfiles for displaying to users that have
                        AVATAR/0+ terminal emulation selected.