Early Years

This is a collection of interesting programs, utilities, and beginnings of games all written in my early years, before I had ever had a class, bought a programming book, or even heard of the 'C' language. This is included more for a history of where I've been, and is in no way representative of my current work, but some of the utils here are still used by me and clients they were written for. All of these are written in Turbo Pascal v7.0, but some will compile in Delphi or FreePascal also. Source code may be included, but be warned, at the time I had no style, and seemed not to believe in variable names more than 2 characters long ;). This list is in no way comprehensive, it just includes some of the programs I found more interesting or entertaining.

• Screen Savers and Silly Graphics

  • MacBomb - probably my first graphical program in Pascal. It depicts a plane bombing Macintosh computers. A nice illustration of the Mac-PC debates occurring between my friends and I at the time.
  • JART - a text-mode graphics editor. Probably my first UI, and my first file format. Both are crude, but effective for my uses at the time. The program allows a user to edit simple graphics (like the ones used in MacBomb) being displayed with the ASCII block characters for each pixel.
  • SlimeIt! - While tutoring a friend in graphic programming, I made SlimeIt, an interesting program that combines screen saver like graphics and an evaluation of the spread of random numbers. Changed later to add playing of music files.
    Running notes: Run SLIMEIT /S to setup the program, and you will probably have to disable music to get it to work.
  
  

• Partially completed

  • STRAT - the beginning of a strategy game. A lot of work was spent developing an extensive menuing system. This is worth looking at just for the user interface, since none of the game was completed.
    Running notes: Music requires a Sound Blaster compatible soundcard, and is enabled under Options | Setup
  
  

• Completed Applications

  • SplitZip - This is a utility used to split a large file into smaller files, and to rejoin them. I have had a few requests for a registered version of this shareware, so last summer I sat down and wrote one when the first request came in. Since I spent time writing the registered version, and only one person has every bought it, I decided to release the registered version for free. This is one program I still use often.
  • TheMenu - This program also used the menuing system developed above. Described originally as "An excellent GUI menu system that takes up no more RAM when running a program than does a batch file. Easy to use and setup. Great for games and other memory hogs."
    Running notes: Run SETUP.EXE once, and then run THEMENU.BAT
  • Tetris - The first of my many "2 Hour Tetrises", written in right around 2 hours with a high school friend, Joe Humrickhouse. Described originally as "A beautiful, 256 color rendition of Tetris, programmed in under 2 and a half hours, by myself and Joe Humrickhouse. 20 different levels with unique backgrounds. High score, mouse, and General Midi support."
    Running notes: Uses MIDI-out for doing sound effects, so you may not hear anything with some sound cards.
    See also: original page
  • AreoTech ship builder - Back before Microsoft owned FASA, and BattleTech was cool, I developed a program to allow the creation of ships for the AreoTech game (an expansion to BattleTech) and printing of created ships. This was probably my first program I wrote with a practical use. Written with Turbo Pascal 3.0, it seems.
  • Label Printing Program - my first commercial application. I was contracted to write a program that allowed a user to input UPCs and text to be sent to a label printer. The printer just took a formatted text file, without much logical order. This program is still used daily at Esser's Warehouse Liquors of Brainerd, MN. It uses an advanced user interface (for text mode, that is) module I wrote, including help files and other features that make it very easy to use.
  • "Search" - Original description: "Search was originally made for Esser's Warehouse Liquors of Brainerd, MN, for use with RetailTrak, but Search can be used with any text file, and many data files, and works great for log files and other records (like the transaction records created by RetailTrak)."
    See also: original page
  • "CONV" - This is one program I still use and update. It was my first HTML generating program, to which I've added many options over the years. It originally took a list of image files and generated a file that allowed you to easily preview what the files would look like tiled, in order to evaluate what image would work well for a background image on a web page. It now has other options, such as generating an HTML file which displays every image in the supplied file list, one after another. Good for quickly scanning through a directory to find an image you're looking for. Includes a .BAT file that generates a file list with all image files in the current directory.