Wow! Thanks to DOSBox I've had the pleasure of running some of these old programs again! I am now able to include some screenshots and executables... DOSBox is great! :-)
Dis386 is a disassembler
API written entirely in Intel Assembly for the 80386, with interfaces and samples for C and Pascal too. Dis386
is a very old project that I have choosen to publish mainly for historical and affective reasons. It is available
in source code only.
Mon386 is a debugging API
and the perfect companion for Dis386 above. Like the latter, it is written in 386 Assembly with interfaces in C
and Pascal. I wrote this library because I was interested in playing with the debug registers that were introduced
with the 80386 processor. Unfortunately debug registers can only be used with high (kernel) priviledges, so this
library became quickly useless as newer operating systems got to block such features for user programs. But as
always, it was well worth the time spent on it. You can find the source code here.
TextGX is a small library
that allows DOS program to display real-time graphics while still remaining in text mode. It works on the nice
little idea of redefining the shape of unused VGA characters in realtime. This is of course entirely useless today,
but still very interesting. The source code includes demos and examples written in
Pascal. Look at this screenshot to see what the library allows (the program
runs in text mode and all the images are animated, you can also get the compiled executable
and run it in DOSBox).
ModeX is a graphics library
that works in the famous mode "X" described by Michael Abrash in his Dr. Dobb's column. It has so many
features that I had to put everything in a dedicated page. I hope you enjoy it!
Hanoi. I wrote this little
program in 1989 to try recursive calls in Assembly. It is a 178 bytes (yes, bytes) COM file that solves the famous
Tower of Hanoi problem, and you can still run it in a DOS window! I've just found that I still like it so here
it is, source and executable in a single archive.
Wing Commander Trainer.
Wing Commander was a great game, but it had a few gameplay problems. The last and toughest battles would last forever,
with the enemy ships stubbornly moving fast and randomly across the screen so that it was almost impossible to
hit them. I got quickly bored of that. Still, I was curious to see the ending so, after a very short argument
with my conscience, eventually I resorted to chea... err, helping the luck. I loaded the game into a debugger
and found where the address of the critical variables, then hacked up a short
assembly program that used that information and a very simple idea to give me infinite energy and shields.
The enemy was ultimately defeated...
ComarTel. An idea that
was quite ahead of its time and allowed BBS users to watch TeleVideo on their computer. This was a three people
project: Mauro owned the BBS and provided support, testing and documentation; Amedeo wrote the BBS plugin to interface
with the TeleVideo cards and I wrote the user interface. Basically the BBS hardware contained a card to receive
and decode the TeleVideo TV signal, then a plugin allowed the decoded stream to be sent to an active BBS connection
and finally the user interface would display the data and allow for user interaction, providing features such as
snapshots and searches that could not be possible with a standard TV set (also, support for TeleVideo was quite
expensive in 1992 and not many TV sets had it.) Unfortunately I can't find the source code anymore and can only
provide the executable... :-(
Freddy's Chord Editor.
A very simple editor that produces small guitar chord images, just like those shown below . Paste them into your
favorite lyrics editor and enjoy! :-) Here are the Delphi sources and compiled
executable (for Windows).
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TextSearch. An assembly
implementation of the Boyer-Moore and Shift-And search algorithms, with a demo program. Supports fuzzy searches
too. Source code only.
XDLE. An enhanced line
editor for the DOS prompt, with several advanced features. Download the ASM source and compiled
COM file in a single archive.
I usually like to draw icons and
images for my programs. These were originally designed for a commercial Win 3.1 application, which could (optionally)
animate its icon according to the current state. I have now converted them to animated GIF.
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Dr. Track is a MOD player and (world first)
editor for DOS. It was my first (and only) shareware program, and sold quite a few copies. It's a good program,
still plays great under DOSBox! Get the full story on the dedicated Dr. Track page!
Copyright (c) 2003-2004,2005 Alessandro Scotti. All rights reserved.
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