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Old Stuff

This is a collection of a few things I wrote in the past.

3D Submarine Demo

Screenshot of Submarine Demonstration Program

A 3D simulation of a submarine in a fish tank (yes, strange I know!) It was a graphics course assessment at the University of York (I'd done the course the year before, but wanted to try the assessment anyway). The binary is for Windows and needs to be unzipped.

Download:

The previous year's "Miracle Grow" growing plant assessment:

Bomber

Screenshot of Bomber

Bomber Based on the famous Bomberman games, its my own PC/DOS implementation in 320x200 Mode-X. This is very dated now (work first started on it in 1996, and it hasn't really been modified much since 1997!), but it's still good fun to play. It's multiplayer (up to four, but on the same keyboard). The AI takes over if a player doesn't move.

Download:

New(er)! A rough port to Windows that I started. Press Alt+Enter for full-screen, and F5 for a 3D version!

The keys for the four players are:

Red uses up/down/left/right and shift. Green uses Q, A, Z, X and tab. Yellow uses keypad minus, plus, insert, delete and enter. Blue uses J, M, comma, full-stop and space. Backspace skips. Enter for retry. Escape for end game. Pause pauses.

Flame Scope

Screenshot of Flame Scope

An audio-visualiser for CD's in DOS provides generated images in time to the CD music. Although it's a rather dated DOS program, if you can run it, I'd give it a try!

Important: Requires MSCDEX to be loaded, a CD player to be audio-connected to a SoundBlaster compatible sound-card (with 'BLASTER' environment set-up) and the CD-input must be selected as an active input.

The visualization will only look good and react to beats if the CD's mixer-volume is very high. (Press right-arrow in program a few times to increase CD-volume, compensate by pressing down-arrow to reduce master volume)

Some keys are:

                       Esc = Exit program
   1-9,0,Shift+1-9,Shift+0 = Track 1-9,10,11-19,20
                     Space = Automatic-mode on/off
               W,F,D,Enter = Change wave,flame,display,palette manually
        Up/Down,Left/Right = Master, CD-audio & line-in volume up/down
                   S,P,E,C = Start/Stop, Pause CD, Eject CD, Close CD drawer
 Scroll-Lock/Tab/Shift+Tab = Display track & time info always/temporarily/disc
                         Q = 'Quad-screen' display on/off (hi-res)
                         G = Artificial 'Generated' waves when quiet on/off

Can show track names (Tab or ScrollLock) from C:\WINDOWS\CDPLAYER.INI (if they have been entered from CDPLAYER in Windows) only if the appropriate section names (e.g. [ABCDE]) in CDPLAYER.INI are preceeded by a line with the disc's full Id-number on (e.g. #000001A2B3C4D). This can be found by pressing Shift+Tab on an unrecognised CD.

MouseFix

This is a small utility program I wrote to correct a problem that is experienced by some users of the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical Mouse, whose devices have defective microswitches under the buttons causing a single-click to be seen by Windows as a double-click (seemingly not "debounced" properly).

Contrary to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 266738 — IntelliMouse: Mouse Double-Clicks When You Try to Single-Click — this problem is most likely to be caused by faulty hardware. However, I couldn't be bothered sending my mouse back, so I wrote a software solution to the problem.

For my mouse, the problem seems to be that the switch isn't "debounced" when you release the button — i.e. when you release it, it actually clicks again. Basically, the program intercepts "up" events for the left mouse button, and ignores any subsequent "up" events that follow within a very small time.

Installing MouseFix

  1. Download the utility:

  2. Unzip, and place the files in C:\Program Files\MouseFix.
  3. Create a shortcut to MouseFix.exe and place it in the Startup folder of the Start menu.
  4. Log off and back on again — your mouse should no longer double-click by accident!

If you manually run the executable, only run it once — you will not see anything to indicate the utility is running, but you should be able to locate the MouseFix.exe item in TaskManager (you can exit the utility by ending the task).

Additional Notes

This utility is provided free of charge and without a warrenty of any kind. I am not responsible for any damage or loss that may occur. USE ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

This utility will only work on Windows NT, 2000 or XP. However, I have made the source-code available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, and someone could probably adapt it to work on Windows 95/98/ME.

TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN icons

Some icons I made for TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN.