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	The F@t Guy's Utilities Suites , applications, and tools by The F@t Guy

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About TFGCmd
The concept

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TFGCmd Suite
Version.7 (MountainMan)
The F@t Guy's NTVDM Compilation

Coming SOON! TFGCmd is in late alpha stage production and works perfectly well. It's not yet widely distributable, as it still lacks help support and awaits TFGPkg's redevelopment for updating capabilities, and the ability to ownload the initial packages automatically. I am greatly interested in beta testers who are familiar with the original TFGDOS or TFGCmd suites for feedback. Write to me if you would like to participate.

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TFGCmd is the logical continuation of my TFGDOS compilation. TFGDOS ended in version 4, and TFGCmd began with version 6 (leaving version 5 for one final TFGDOS upgrade, which may never happen).

When Windows went to NT, TFGDOS's days were numbered, And that number began to show itself with the implementation of XP SP-2, which broke about half of the suite's 16bit executables... A series of quickly wrought scripts glued it back together, but I had long ago lost the source for the BASIC executables (in the Great Rootbeer Disaster of '98).

With the advent of Win6 (vista), TFGDOS began acting dangerously, so I pulled it from distribution. A similar, but wholly different structure began to take shape in the form of TFGCmd - largely a collection of scripts and batches during version 6. Finally, with Windows 7 pushing 64 bit, Horst Schaeffer's WBAT GUI finally died a cruel death. Since I had always been a console app kind of guy, the interface to what TFGDOS/TFGCmd could do relied upon Wbat enabled scripts to provide an interface, so without WBAT, the entire platform collapsed, and with nothing but scripts since the demise of TFGDOS, there was nothing left but for a handful of console apps that somehow survived it all. While it was patched again with some hasty scripting, TFGCmd was pulled from distribution, as it's effective use depended upon a deep knowledge of it's working parts, too much to ask a user to absorb readily.

But my stuff is not developer oriented - I am a service tech first, and my work depends upon what I had created, so with that in mind, I began a scratch rebuild of the entire suite. This time, I resolved to depend upon no one elses work to provide the general framework of the suite, which meant I needed to replace the function of WBAT with something of my own. The Thing was created to serve that function. While it endeavors to replace WBAT, it's function is native to Windows, eliminating all the troubles I had trying to support a DOS interface in a CmdBox... And while it probably isn't as easy to set up as a WBAT script, it's really just basic HTML scripting, so many people will be able to step right into it.

So TFGCmd7 begins with a general purpose GUI component to provide interface to scripting on the fly. The whole thing revolves around that.

And old standbys are being rebuilt... All windows based, written in Delphi, so there will be no more destructive incompatibilities... and all written by me, so that the basics of the system will always be available.

But the basic purpose remains the same - To provide a utility based framework, a set of directories, a help system, and a purposeful means of collecting and using diverse programs and applications useful to service techs, with a distinctive lean toward the cmdline and toward scripting...

It is a bit different than TFGDOS - The boot-up stuff has all been depricated, but it's ability to be portable, and to run from CD has been over-emphasized, if that is possible. It is also web oriented - with updating available, and a script based system for updating any utility you might wish to add. It provides basic viewing and editing capabilities, and a standard set of the best utilities I have found on the web - all customizable, and at your disposal.

The distribution has changed to abide by general licensing guidelines. The parts and apps written by me are in the initial download, with an initial setup run to download and propagate the utilities which come from others. Once this 'builder' copy is established, the suite can be copied from there and distributed to other machines, just by pasting the directory and establishing one standing variable, and adding two directories to the front of the system path. TFGcmd.exe also provides a portable CmdBox, so it can easily be set up on a thumb, plumbing it's own paths and variables into a Cmdbox stub, with an additional 'autoexec bat' which runs whenever the exe is fired (in portable mode). So putting your favorite scripting tools on your thumb is as easy as dumping the TFGCmd directory onto your thumb and providing a link to 'tfgcmd.exe /port' in your startup menu.