What's There

Here you may find some practical information and free software applications including source code. When downloading any executable stuff please be aware that I programmed it for my own needs, and share it guessing that it may be of some use, but I can't provide any warranty. You can bug me if it doesn't work for you though, I will find time to fix it. If there is anything I should know, feel free to contact me: info@fastestcode.org I tend to check mail once a day.

Programming On Bare Hardware

Tools, code and some information. Depends quite a bit on Watcom specific C compiler features, or written in particular for use with Watcom toolkit. Since the Watcom suite is open-source now, you can get the latest version here for free. This compiler is of kind one needs to learn to use (especially MSVC/BCC people), but it's powerful.

Fire up secondary SVGA card using its own VGA BIOS.
Initializing/Soft-Booting dual (separate bus) video graphics adapters using their ROM BIOS. Introduction with example code. It's rather a wicked procedure, a hack, sice VGA BIOS spec. doens't define support for more than one VGA card.

Old-School Debugging Stuff
A quick introduction to useful debugging techniques when programming on bare hardware, or messing around with what people call these days "classic PC computers" as if there were any real difference in how transistors work. Anyway, using separate screen for debug/info output while the main screen is busy displaying your state-of-art achievements. Includes some utilities and (hopefully) useful C code.

Applications for Windows

A couple of applications for Windows I wrote a while ago. I place the source code hereby into public domain so you can use it any way.

Disk Imaging Utilities for NT (See Screenshot).
Set of command line utilities for working with disk data directly. They work with Fixed Disk and SD/MMC/USB drives, not floppies. Basically good for making images, building bootable CF disks, or just hacking around disk data. Windows NT 5+ Required.

MIDI-Thru - Port Router (See Screenshot).
A tool for musicians. Helpful for wiring the outboard gear trough the computer. It provides functionality to attach physical MIDI In/Outputs in software.

Random Stuff

Things that no longer quite fit, but still get enough of attention to be kept.

Rants On Windows Programming
Not everything about the Windows API is documented. Poking around in headers or experimenting is sometimes necessary to get things going the way you want them. There is some assorted stuff from a blog I used to have.

21^ST Century Thief Player's Guide
Or "Building a Classic Box for games that were released before boring mainstream took over the PC gaming industry". Since Thief is the most awesome game in the universe, that is people are still bugging the legal owner to release the source code (because the developer was defunct), and making hack-patches to get the game going on recent systems. That all a way too long after the game was released.