Legacy

Here you will find a collection of antiquated programs I wrote during my teenage years. Many of them are poorly written and serve little to no practical use. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about computers, programming, math and many other things during my time writing and experimenting with these programs, and Visual Baisc 6 in general. If I recall, almost every program here is written in VB6 and as such, considerably past their “use-by” date. Microsoft no longer supports VB6, and I abandoned it a while ago myself.

These programs come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. They are not guaranteed to be functional, useful, or risk-free. Additionally, I offer absolutely no support for the programs listed here. Do not expect new releases or any kind of bug fixes. By downloading the files provided below, you are assuming all responsibility for any kind of damage or loss that may arise out of their use. You agree that the developer (me) and no other party shall be held liable for any damages arising out of the use or inability to use these programs. These programs are free to modify and distribute, as covered under the GNU GPL-3.0 license.

That said, these programs are provided as educational examples, for learning from and experimenting with. Even though I wrote the programs long ago, there continues to be some interest in them (primarily from my very old Youtube videos demonstrations of them). Enjoy!

BFPL

BFPL stands for “Brandon Foltz Programming Language” (who would’ve guessed?). It’s a rather limited and esoteric interpreted programming language I wrote in high school. It was the first of several experiments into writing my own programming language. Here’s a video demonstration. Included in the download is a readme file explaing the language, some example programs, as well as the source code and compiled executable. You can download it here.

BFBC Collection

Not terribly long after writing BFPL, I realized that interpreters were rather slow, and a pain to write. Not being experienced enough to write an actual compiler for machine code, I took the step in between. I wrote a byte code interpreter. Faster than a language-parsing interpreter, but still not quite as fast as machine code. BFBC supported some graphics functions, whereas the old BFPL did not. The reason this package is called “BFBC Collection”, is included with the bytecode interpreter are several compilers I wrote for the byte code, each with their own unique language. One of them, “BFPL2”, is an assembly-like language. The other, named “Not-Really-Basic”, features a considerably easier to understand language, with function names taken from other BASIC family languages. Though as the name suggests, it’s not really basic. You can download it here.

UberCalc Collection

Much like BFBC, UberCalc was a bytecode interpreter. Though unlike BFBC, it was focused on numeric calculation alone, and didn’t have any graphical functions. I stopped working on it after I broke it numerous times trying to optimize, as you’ll see in the “Speed Crazed Butchered Versions” folder. Of course, the original working version is there as well. Included additionally is UberCalc ASM, an assembly like compiler for the UberCalc bytecode. You can download them here.

RemSole

RemSole unsurprisingly stands for “Remote Console”. I wrote it to perform simple maintainence on my server when I was away from home. This was back before I knew about SSH or other remote terminal programs. That, and I just preferred to make my own tools. Then again, I still prefer to make my own tools, if of course it’s at all practical or beneficial to do so. Maybe I just do it for the sake of doing it, and learning from the process. You can view a video demonstration of this program on Youtube. This program still has a number of bugs that I never fixed, and will register as a trojan horse virus in many modern anti-virus programs. It was never intended for malicious purposes, though it has some trojan-like qualities. Namely, being able to retrieve information from a remote computer without the serving computer being aware. You can download it here.

Galactic Trader

Galactic Trader is a game I began working on myself, but never finished. It was inspired by a text based Space-RPG I had on my Palm Zire many years ago. I can’t remember the name of that game, but the concept is fairly well understood. You would travel all across the galaxy, buying, trading, and selling goods, battling pirates (or being a pirate yourself), upgrading your ship, so on and so forth. My dream for this game was to have a constantly changing universe, run by the AI where next to nothing was scripted. I wanted to be able to go to a system, and find a raging battle going on there (that of course I didn’t know about ahead of time, and wasn’t part of any storyline). I wanted to go where I expected a trade vessel to be, and find ruins being scavenged by pirates. Likewise, be able to venture out into expectedly empty space and find a bustling city filled with characters. I think you get the idea, it would be a constantly changing and unpredictable game environment. There is a video of an early version of the game on Youtube. I quickly realized this was far beyond the scope of my programming skills, and abandoned the project. You can download the remains here. If you want it to run, you might need to register the included PBGL.dll file on your system.

Easy DOS

Easy DOS is a very simple, menu-based program for operating a Microsoft DOS system. Rather than having to type out commands (that you might not know or understand), it presents you with a series of menus for running and operating common DOS programs. There is a video demonstration of it on Youtube. It was written in Q-Basic, and is compiled for 16-bit DOS systems. Sadly, I no longer have the source code for Easy DOS, and only the executable remains. You can download it here.

Multiplayer Pong

What a unique name, boy I sure am creative. This was my first attempt at a multiplayer networked game. What better a game idea to use than Pong? There isn’t any lag compensation or movement prediction, so I wouldn’t recommend playing it over and unstable connection or you may experience some very erratic ball/paddle movement and difficulty playing. Not bad for a first try though, if I say so myself. You can download it here.