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Still using Windows Explorer for file management?
Then let me introduce you to the contenders:
AccelMan v3.5.0 build 3600
XPlorer2 v1.6.5.3
XYPlorer v6.10.0000
Altap Salamander v2.5

AccelMan
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AccelMan has the most customizable interface of any application I’ve ever seen. The ‘Managers’ are each dockable and maximizable, allowing for vertical view, horizontal view, tri-view, and just about any other view you can think of. And each manager has its own tab bar, so if you prefer a tabbed interface, go for it. You can customize the toolbars, the colors, and even the context menus (!!!). AccelMan is really a whatever-you-want-it-to-be File Manager. It’s even got its own music player, though I’m not sure why you would want this. One strange (and appreciated) feature is the built-in command line enabled by default. Normally, I’d think that would be tucked away in an option menu since most computer users don’t even know what it is, but it’s right there at the bottom, and in constant use on my computer. AccelMan also has a very intuitive bookmark bar, whereas many other file managers make bookmarking a time-consuming process. AccelMan has a few faults, the main one being that you can’t calculate all folder sizes in the current manager. I guess that’s why there is SpaceMonger. One of my favorite features of AccelMan: Ability to set what the 4th mouse button does. This thing, I love, and it’s almost reason enough to use AccelMan by itself. By default, the 4th button (or back button) on my mouse will go back to the last folder I visited. Using AccelMan, I can set this to go up a directory, instead of back to the last folder I was at. For instance, going from C:\ to E:\Something, hitting the button normally will take me back to C:\. Hitting back in AccelMan can take me to E:\. Note, this feature is optional, and you can actually set the back button to just about anything you want it to do. This feature IS possible to use in other file managers by mapping the 4th mouse button to the backspace key in Logitech MouseWare, but MouseWare is BloatWare, and negatively interferes with my mouse acceleration along with ruining compatability for the extra buttons in various programs (Ventrilo is one that comes to mind).

I was lucky enough to grab this application when it was on GiveAwayOfTheDay.com. Yes, I actually got this amazing application for free (hard to believe they gave it away free, I know).

XPlorer2
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XPlorer2 is a great orthodox file manager, possibly the best. With a very clean interface, and a decent set of features, XPlorer2 is very complete file manager. The Lite version has quite a few limitations, but without making the application useless, and it doesn’t go around water-marking all your files You only get two toolbars in the lite version, but whoever needed more than two? It even lets you remove the donate button. The problem with the toolbar is that there aren’t many buttons to choose from. Only some features can be made into toolbar buttons, and to be specific, all the useless features that already have shortcut key and need not be made into toolbar buttons, can be made into toolbar buttons. The Options menu is very complete, with every option I can think of and would want, lacking only in the fact that it’s not very organized, and to get a full sense of the options, you have to sit down and read 3 pages of menus to find the one you want. One nice feature of XPlorer2 is it’s full set of detail column selections. Any column you want, it has, and then some. One of my favorite features of XPlorer2 is that when you press CTRL + D, XPlorer2 will list for you folder sizes. A very handy feature. Another one of my favorite features is in Tools > Options > Window Tab, under Tree, uncheck ‘Keep synchronized with folder in active view pane’. Personally, I jump in and out of folders a lot, and by the time I’m done the tree menu becomes useless since it has expanded every folder I’ve visited. Disabling the feature in options allowed you to choose when you want to expand a folder, and doesn’t take matters into its own hands. I also keep a button on my Toolbar called ‘Tree sync’, which will expand the tree to the current folder I’m in. The perfect button and the perfect option. One lacking feature in XPlorer2 is that you have to use XP style selection. Other file managers offer a custom file selection so when you miss click once, your selection doesn’t go down the tube. Another missing feature is the lack of a custom shell menu. You have to use the default windows one, except when right clicking a blank area in a pane. This makes the application as slow and clumsy for file operations as Windows File Explorer. Still, being the only decent free file manager out there, XPlorer2 provides a very clean and clear file manager, with things where they should be, and no need for extra customization as everything comes done right.

XYPlorer
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XYPlorer is one of my personal favorites, not just because it has a wiki (http://88.191.26.34/XYwiki/index.php), but also because it presents a new kind of interface, venturing out of the old, and into the new (much in the same manner AccelMan does). The only problem with this is that XYPlorer’s best feature is also its worst: There are wonderfully implemented tabs!!!! But you can only use tabs. XYPlorer has great tabs, I’ll give it that, but when comparing directory structures from a bird’s-eye-view, you can’t do that with tabs. Tabs offer the greatness of not needing multiple windows, and other orthodox file managers offer tabs on the bottom of the dual panes, but XYPlorer took the next step, and just got rid of the dual panes alltogether. A bold move, but I think that this lowers their userbase by not offering the interface compatability so many people require. XYPlorer makes up for this with a great file search engine, and a handy little properties pane that will appear at the bottom on command (F12). The configuration menu is a step in the right direction, providing labels on what the checkbox groups do, but still lacking. Group boxes people, GROUP BOXES. Not only do they make interface design easier for the programmer, but they are greatly appreciated by the user too. It’s a standard feature in nearly every ui kit, but not used enough in file manager options. Instead, XYPlorer offers a similar settings menu to Xplorer2: You get to read a short essay every time you want to change a settings. XYPlorer offers a pretty standard set of settings, but is missing on a few things. For instance, you can’t disable the tree from automatically expanding every folder you go into. Bookmarking is also next to impossible to do with XYPlorer, and they came up with a new name for it, ‘Catalog’ they call it. What is a catalog you say? It’s where you keep you categories of course! What is a category? My dear friend, surely you know that categories are where you keep your Catalog Items, right? Catalog = Bookmark Toolbar (though it’s not a toolbar :’( ), Category = Folder, Catalog Item = Bookmark. Why? To confuse you. Adding catalog items is an arduous task, one not to be undertaken in a single sitting. First one must right click the catalog and add a new category. Only once one has a new category can one actually add a catalog item. Right click the category, and click add catalog item. Ahah! Now we’re getting somewhere. And to make matters worse, there is no catalog toolbar, it’s a listview in the bottom left corner. XYPlorer requires a moderatore amount of customization to make the thing usable (not as much as AccelMan, mind you), but once you have things where they should be (btw, the rest button seems to not work, so don’t mess stuff up too bad), XYPlorer makes browsing an easy process. Just don’t ever close XYPlorer, start up time is quite slow… XYPlorer does offer custom shell menu entires, and lauds over its ‘Extended Drag’N'Drop’ feature, which is just a crappy (yes, crappy, the thing is nearly USELESS) custom shell menu for drag and dropping, that just so happens to be implemented badly so its just as slow as windows explorer. Another problem offered by XYPlorer is its constant freezing. I’m not sure what it thinks it’s doing, but when I open files in XYPlorer, somtimes the manager freezes after the file is opened. It doesn’t go completely dead, but freezes for a few seconds. I think XYPlorer suffers from nonconformism, while AccelMan (sorry in advance for the pun) excels in it. XYPlorer requires tabs, the use of stupid names for things, and the only interface you can really customize is the toolbar. Look under Windows > Layout. That is the full extent of UI customization. Sure, you can hide the tree, and category (yes, do hide the category, that ugly little…), but as far as UI customization goes, those things are drops in the bucket. XYPlorer has a nice feature set, and feels almost as clean as XPlorer2, but enough lacking features make it tough to see past them. And yet, somehow, I still find this application to be one of my favorites. I guess that is because aside from the catalog, XYPlorer is extremely intuitive. Things are where I’d expect them to be. Yes, thats right, if any other file manager dev’s are looking, take a page from XYPlorer and make your application more intuitive. I like things where they should be.

Altap Salamander
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My first impression of this program was that it looked like it wasn’t what I was looking for in a file manager. But since then, it has grown on me. Going through the configuration menu, I quickly noticed something: This configuration window is the best configuration windows out there. Everything in a neatly ordered expandable treeview, and changing a setting I want would take a matter of seconds in this baby. It also has a great little menu in the config called Change Drive Menu. That menu is possibly my favorite thing in the entire config. Salamander also has a great set of color schemes with it, each effectively implemented. One thing I noticed while using Salamander is that the icons are all effectively backwards. They only color themselves in when you highlight them, and otherwise remain dull and colorless. Why? That’s one feature I could do without. After spending a minute looking for the tree, I realized there is no tree. Hmm? No tree!? Surely this application is missing a few screws. Then I tried navigating a few folders to see how it felt. Not bad! The up arrow .. provides a neat way of going up one level (everyone who has ever used linux/dos will appreciate this) and it also has an intuitive breadcrumb feature, just click which level you want to go to. Selecting files is implemented nicely, exactly the way I’d want it to be. It even has a nice little middle bar, which I do recommend you enable. And the toolbar comes pre-configured with a great selection of buttons. The customization for the toolbar is also great, and I only needed to add one button to my toolbar, the calculate folder sizes button. Initially loading a folder can take a second, but Salamander makes a cache of it after that, and with the cache it browses faster than any of its competitors. Its also very easy to learn the keyboard shorcuts. If you don’t know one, just goto the menu with they button and it will tell you the shortcut. Looking through Slamander, there are only 3 features I miss: The back button on my mouse takes me back, not up a level, the icons are backwards, and the bookmarking is a pain (you’re also limited to 10 bookmarks. Why?!!!). You must do dual panel browsing (no horizonatal or triview, and no tabs) and you can’t use a tree, but other than that the interface is fairly customizable, and works great at the default settings. It has a well-implemented custom drag’n'drop menu (unlike XYPlorer’s buggy one) so it is very fast for drag’n'drop operations (AccelMan is just as fast too), but suffers from the regular right click menu for everything else, making it painfully slow to create an archive of thousands of files in a single directory. Salamander truly has a great feature set, and includes many useful plugins.

Conclusion
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Each program has it’s own strengths and weaknesses and I was not able to determine a single winner. Until these managers become perfected, it is my opinion that you will have to make the decision for yourself. I’ve presented you with information on each and with this as your guide you should be able to gut the old Windows Explorer and replace it with a sleek new 3rd party File Manager.

Revision 349 of PCSX2 was just committed earlier today. Here is a compiled binary for the emulator.
ChangeLog:
r349 IPU fixes. Corrected bitstream data positioning and removed redundant code.
r348 Ignore this commit. It was just a test.

Download PCSX2 SVN 349 here

I am guessing DeSmuME 0.8 should be coming out soon. Until then, here is the latest CVS build. Not many changes since the last build, but here they are:
- Key config can be changed on the command line. Save/load hotkeys changed (so expose doesn't override). [Jeff B]
- Key bindings may work better on non-US keyboards now (needs testing). [Jeff B]
As in the previous release, I changed only two files. OGLRender.c and snddx.c can be found in the source code of the previous release.

Download DeSmuME CVS 2008-04-19 Build Here

PCSX2 is a popular PS2 emulator for the PC. While they do release their own beta builds on their website, I wanted to release some of my own. Thus, I bring you PCSX2 SVN 347. The only change I made to application was that I changed the background image. The new image is available in PSD format here. The source code is available from the SourceForge project page. To use this update first open the downloaded executable and choose a path for it to extract to. Then copy over the extracted files into your PCSX2 folder. You do need a copy of PCSX2 to use this update.

If you like this program leave a comment. I will not continue making SVN builds if no one wants them and the only way I can tell is if people leave comments.

Here is a change log from revision 343 to 347 taken from the SVN:
r347 slight change to the interrupt status on cdvd
r346 Path 3 transfers now only use interleave mode if Path 3 Masking is used. This stops Tekken Tag from randomly crashing (hopefully)
r345 small adjustment to h/vsync things. fpu clamping fix for NFS Carbon which was crashing, managed to do it without breaking katamari, bet smth broke tho lol
r344 cleaned up some of the defines in common.h for v/hsync. uncommented some code which shouldnt have been commented for vsyncs, was causing supersonic speeds on boot and probably throwing all that hard work out :p

Download PCSX2 SVN 347

DeSmuME is a well known Nintendo DS emulator. It is multi-platform and open source, written in C. The only problem is they haven’t released a new version in almost 6 months. And it is not like they haven’t been working on the program. So, I took it upon myself to compile the latest CVS build freely available from their SourceForge site. This program was compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

I realize that this version is called v0.7.2 in some places but in reality it has no version since it is a CVS compile. It should fall somewhere after the v0.7.2 Windows release, but where exactly that is is up to the developers.

Download DeSmuME CVS 2008-04-07 Here
Source Code Available
DeSmuME Wikipedia Article

My old mouse, the Logitech MX700, died of old age. It had been looking awful for years now, and the charger had long since stopped working, so I had been using my own recharger and rechargeable batteries for what seemed like ages. So it was time to buy a new mouse. I settled on the Fatal1ty 1010. It looked cool, was built for gamers, had a scroll button, side button, and a neat pinky button, and, most of all, was quite cheap at the time. I’ve been using it for about a month now.

Just recently, I started binding the pinky finger button to actions in video games. It’s a button on the mouse, surely it’s meant to be used, so why not? After about 5 minutes of use, I noticed something. While it would seem the pinky finger is doing nothing but sitting on the side of the mouse for no reason, it actually has a very important position. The pinky finger, combined with the thumb, allow you to pick up the mouse and move it, such as one would often need to do in video games. But on the Fatal1ty 1010, the pinky finger is supposed to be sitting on top of the mouse. My question is, HOW THE **** AM I SUPPOSED TO PICK UP MY MOUSE THEN?

Try it, for a minute: Put all fingers ontop of the mouse and the thumb on the side. Now try picking up your mouse to move it from one spot to another. Hard, isn’t it? It requires your fingers to flex in a strange way to provide the needed friction to execute a controlled lift of the mouse. With your fingers like that in a fire fight you can’t pull the trigger. Now switch back to the pinky on the side. Easy to pick up, and still able to press the fire button.

I present this information to you as a case of failed engineering. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts, or otherwise information on this subject you’d like to share, feel free to comment below.

Why is Halo PC dead? Because there’s an aimbot out there, silly! But how did it get there, and why? And most of all, who is responsible for this?

A coder named Bitterbanana was writing a neat Zelda mod for Halo CE that would include Zelda-like aiming, which locks on to the target. Consequently, in writing such a mod, it opened the door for an aimbot with just a few modifications to the code. Having an aimbot on his hands, I suppose Bitterbanana couldn’t keep it locked up forever and decided to share it with a few close friends. Of those people was a person named Thekeihatsu. At this time I did not know either Bitterbanana or Thekeihatsu. But that would soon change. While hanging out in the FOX clan teampseak, I talked to a few people that said they had really seen an aimbot and that Thekeihatsu had a copy of it. Intrigued, I found his Xfire and began chatting with him. After a few minutes of conversation, I convinced him that I’d like a copy of the aimbot but only for use from a coding perspective, to see how the aimbot worked. I’d never release it to the public, of course >:) After what seemed only a 5 minute conversation with a person I had never met before, I had a copy of the aimbot. Simple enough.

The original aimbot was only coded by Bitterbanana. I didn’t even recompile it or fix the few bugs he had in it (I never much liked VB anyway). With this aimbot, I decided to attempt a little extortion. I had recently (within the past few days) been banned from TeamWarfare League. The league decided that with all the wallhackers and the blue wallers and map modifiers, there needed to be some anticheat. An anticheat just recently came out, but it was awful. It basically just listed all the program you had running on your computer and did a search for the wallhack file on your computer and returned all the results to the server. This, in my mind, is nothing short of a trojan horse. But TeamWarfare League, having no other anti-cheat to turn to, adopted this one. They made it mandatory to use the program in all matches. As a member of the league, I was outraged. I sent messages to admins in protest, explaining how horrible the program was. I even offered to make a different program that would work without invading users’ privacy. But the only response I got was that if I made the program, they would consider switching. It takes a long time to make such a program, and in the meantime, I’d be forced to run a trojan on my pc.

There was, however, one shortcut I could take. I decided to reverse-engineer the current anti-cheat engine to disable its trojan qualities and consequently, its anticheating abilities. The program used a simple salt challenge with no encryption method, so it took only a few minutes to break. I released my anti-anti-cheat in protest of the required trojan installation for league matches. Needless to say, TeamWarfare League was none-too-happy about this. Instead of asking me to help make a new anti-cheat, or realizing how unsecure and destructive the current one was and dropping its use, they decided to ban me from the league. To this day, I am still banned, and doubt that will ever change. I was very angry at this ban. After all, my clan had won a championship they had offered, and we were fairly respectable players at the time. I messaged many admins in protest, trying to explain how terrible the anti-cheat was and how unfair it was to have to use it. They would hear nothing of it.

Thus came my plan, to release the Halo Aimbot if I was not unbanned from TeamWarfare League. After a few days of messaging admins and complaining to everyone I knew, I started telling people I would release an aimbot soon if I was not unbanned. After a few more days of no change, I released Bitterbanana’s aimbot to the cheating community. It spread like wildfire, and can be seen on hundreds of cheating forums. I even have found it on strange chinese underground cheating places. All league activity came to a halt to deal with this epidemic, and thus far (its been over a year), no cure has been found. Even after releasing the aimbot, I offered to write a cure, an anti-cheat engine, for the leagues to use. But they refused to lift the ban. After a few months, I wrote my own version of the aimbot in C# .NET, one which wouldn’t crash your game randomely and one that was usable in vehicles. And thus, Halo PC is overriden with aimbotters and nearly unplayable by any legitimate player. And with no forseeable means of stopping the cheaters, it seems Halo PC is destined for a slow and painful death ridden with aimbotters and wallhackers.

And with that, my story comes to a close. If you have any comments, questions, or complaints, feel free to reply to this post and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

What is Autify? Autify was my crappy attempt at coding SHADE in raw C++. It didn’t go over too well, but I did get mouse movements working and possibly keystrokes working (I think). This is not by any means a useful program. It is possibly, however, useful code. The reason being that Autify is cross-platform. For years I’ve read of people attempting to code bots in C++ and for years I’ve heard of people attempting to code a cross-platform bot in Java, and I have done both in a single program, though to no usable extent. If anyone finds this remotely useful, please post a comment or drop me an email.

Download Autify Here

This one has been sitting in the ftp folder for a while, so some snoops may already have it.

CsvToTab converts CSV files into tab delimited files. It takes input like a,b,c or ‘a’,'b’,'c’ or “a”,”b”,”c” and puts tabs instead of the commas and/or quotes. I made this because I only found trials online and because I am guessing this one is even faster than those trials. It is written in C++, so is made to be extremely fast.

Download CsvToTab v1.0 Here

Scriptable Human Automation Development Environment v0.1
I was never planning on releasing this, as it is not even close to being ready for release. But someone had mentioned it in an email so I felt I should at least let the world see it, even in its unfit state. I spent about 1-2 weeks writing this program back in July, and now that it is October I can see I am not working on it enough to do it justice.

SHADE provides users a lua-scriptable development environment to the InputAutomator class I wrote. InputAutomator basically performs things a human would such as moving the mouse, typing, and ‘looking’ at the screen. SHADE provides a front-end to the InputAutomator, but if you would rather program directly in C#, InputAutmator is released under the GNU GPL so feel free to. If you do ever make modifications, please drop me an email or post a comment. I’d love to hear about it

Anyways, here is what I have so far: