When I play games I don't really play anything new. Heck, the last game I bought as it was released was Final Fantasy X, the original version.

The one game I do play and perhaps play too much, is Intelligent Qube (or Kurushi since I'm a contrary European) on the PS1. I usually speedrun it, but then …

It's well known that Visual Studio's C compiler hasn't progressed much beyond C89, save for things like variadic macros. What might not be quite as well known is that to rectify this a bit, somebody created a C99 to C89 converter. A decent tool to be sure, but it doesn't integrate well into Visual …

If you haven't been living under a rock (or in a non-Windows world) you'll know that since XP, Windows has had zip file extraction and creation. You may also know that what it doesn't have, is a defined API so us normals can leverage it programmatically. But there are ways and means.

Think about it,…

CreateConsoleScreenBuffer, what a fabulous function. You ask it nicely, and it gives you as many 'console window content' buffers as you want. With the other supporting functions it's everything you need for a AAA game (ascii-art-animation natch). But backup a minute here. what's that mysteriously …

Way back in the mysts o' tyme I told a tale of a little picture-in-picture / interactive zoom tool I was working on. Well, a whole year and 4 months later I got round to fixing the buggy bits and wrote some help pages. Now it's ready for public consumption as an Installer, or just a Zip.

It's simple…

Microsoft say "Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio Professional 2012, or higher."

That isn't quite true. In fact, there's no quite about it. In the current RC version on MSDN, it's downright wr…

If what you're writing already requires a dll, or you can augment an existing one, then you're already set and can use the fact that DllMain gets called when threads are created and destructed to your advantage. If you're not, or can't then you're pretty much stuck for an answer. Conventional wisdo…

Wait, there's a disassembler built into Windows? Well, only in the sense that a supermarket that has the ingredients to build a cake. There's no ready made pastry hidden away in the depths of system32, unlike there is for file hashing [sup][1][/sup].

What there is though, is an aisle full of ingredi…

Linux people who have to work in Windows are sometimes found lamenting about the basic tools it has which are absent from Microsoft's product. While recent developments of Windows have implemented variously featured versions of whoami, ln, cat, grep, ps and chmod, one app that's so far evaded the c…

It doesn't sound like it should be so hard. I mean, the shell has managed to produce it every time you've logged on since Windows XP. MSDN has a page dedicated to user profiles that includes a section on where it is and how its treated. It details that a users picture lives in their temp directory,…