Mega-ZBlog

I won’t make a full post about my Dark Forces Frontend, since I already made a great one here. Background information and download links and everything. I’ve gravitated to using DOSBox with Dark Forces, and now my latest creation aims to package lots of mods easily accessable. Best of all it’s portable (well, thanks to DOSBox, the frontend itself is decidedly unportable on it’s own. :()

Oh and here’s a picture of it with lots of mods installed:

I also tweaked and fixed up a little .NET program I had sitting around which allows one to make Shell Folders in Windows or even peek at or modify system ones. I don’t recommend changing system folders though, it could break things since it is impossible for the program to support everything about shell folders due to Windows’ complexity. But I find it useful to create folders on my desktop which point to various places. It beats junctions and symlinks because you get the real paths with shell folders. On the downside only Explorer can see them.

[Edit: If it crashes when run before the first window appears, blame Microsoft and click Continue. I don’t know why it does that, except every time it happens to me it’s right after I reinstall Windows. Recompiling fixes it, which means I can never debug it since Visual Studio rebuilds before launching it…]

[Edit: Oops I was uploading an old binary, since I was used to VB.NET Express sucking.  I think I fixed it now.]

I’m probably going to add this program to my resume. Not a bad example, even has OO stuff (I forgot about that) which made it 100x easier to code, especially since the registry code was everywhere.

In other news, XP seems to have completely broken. Lots of programs refuse to run, including nLite, Visual Studio, even Windows Update installers. Next time I reinstall XP (which is soon) I’m gonna hold off on installing fancy stuff like the Vista Transformation Pack. Right now Vista works better but I’m gonna need a decent gaming OS eventually… right now I’m on a Stargate marathon so I can put it off. I’m also considering re-partitioning my HD to make room for a bigger Linux partition and slightly expand both Windows partitions.