There are these days many bulletin boards from which one can download pirated copies of a host of commercial software, and some of these programs have even found their way onto pirate CDs. A copy of what purports to be XTree Gold for DOS 4.0 (XTG-D 4.0), originating from one such source, recently came my way. On close examination this turned out to be merely a disguised copy of XTG-D 3.0. It claims to be "a full version released by XTree. It's almost the same as the last version (3.0), but this version supports the latest PKZIP (4.1v) from PKWare". You should not believe a word of this.
The disguise takes the form of altering all references to "Xtree Gold 3.0" in all the component files to "Xtree Gold 4.0" and copyright dates from "1989-1993" to "1989-1994", as well as uprating version numbers of some of the component programs to spurious higher numbers, e.g. ARC2ZIP from 0.01 to 1.00, XTG_EDIT from 2.3i to 2.7i and ZEDIT from 2.0 to 3.0. In every case the programming code is pure unchanged XTG-D 3.0, except that most of the graphics viewers have been doctored to display the pirate's name (The House of Mayhem) during format conversion. Doctoring of the program files was probably done with XTree itself, using the hex editor, and a little detective work revealed that the two altered text files were edited with XTree's 1-Word editor.
The current version of PKZIP at the time of writing (August 1995), incidentally, is 2.04. PKZIP 4.1v, if such a thing exists, is presumably a pirated rip-off of PKZIP 2.04.
To sum up, there is no such thing as XTree Gold for DOS 4.0 (or, for that matter, 3.1, sightings of which have also been reported). Any copies carrying these version numbers are nothing more than XTG-D 3.0 in disguise. And we are never likely to see any genuine new releases higher than version 3.0, for Symantec (who now own XTree) have recently announced that they will in future only be developing Windows 95 programs. So we will all have to content ourselves with 3.0. The XTree Tips series is dedicated to helping you to get the best out of it.
I hope that the recent advertiser in Micro Mart who asked for XTree Gold 4 for DOS did not pay good money for a copy.
Tom Ruben