This page focuses mainly on my older projects — the ones I got started with. Most of these were written back when I was in high school, which would have been in the late 1980s (I was a graduate of the class of 1990). A few projects go into my early college years.
Galactic Warzone
Galactic Warzone was the first BBS door game that I successfully published. GW was a text-only game and ran under popular PC related bbs systems, such as RBBS. Players were granted a maximum of 60 minutes per day to play, and everyone usually maxed their time limit out. It was an addictive game, and I still get requests to write an Internet version. Although GW wasn’t my most successful bbs game, it is what I’m most recognized for.
Door Driver
Once I began to write bbs games, I realized that what the world really needed was a general purpose door writing kit, and so I set out to write Door Driver. Much of the code was taken from GW, generalized, and made into a general purpose package. Door Driver later became the platform for all of my future games, and was adopted by many other programmers as well.
Echodoor
Echomail was the means by which bbs systems exchanged email, and worked much in the same way that the current Newsgroup system does now. Most of the old bbs programs didn’t originally support Echomail, and so I wrote Echodoor as a means for any old bbs to support echomail. As time passed, the bbs systems each began to add native support for echodoor, and I sold the project to another author.
SZModem
SZModem, also called "SuperZModem" (and even "ScottZModem") was an extension of the Zmodem file transfer protocol. Back in the days of DOS, which did not multitask, many of us spent long hours downloading files via modem. When the computer was busy downloading, you were basically stuck doing nothing. SZModem was intended to fix that. It was based on a simple form of task switching that allowed you to do various things while the transfer was in progress – clean up files, chat with the person on the other end, and even play a game of tetris.
Land Of Devastation
Land of Devastation was my most successful bbs game in terms of registrations and financial return. During LOD’s reign, there were more than a thousand paid registered bbs’ operating LOD, with ten times as many running the "free" shareware version. LOD was a pioneer in it’s time, being one of the first games to include a remote graphical terminal program which featured VGA graphics and four channel sound. The game was a great success up until the fall of bbs systems and the rise of the internet.
Other BBS projects:
There were a handful of other early bbs-related projects that met with only marginal success. They include: the Mach-10 BBS system, ScottBBS, Galactic Warzone II, several mail readers, ports of the Leach and Geopolitics games (contrary to popular belief I did not write Leach or Geopolitic, but merely ported them from WWIV to doordriver).
CD-ROM Projects:
I briefly worked on several CD-ROM titles that were shareware related, including the MegaCD-ROM series. Originally called MegaRom, the discs were unique in the respect that they had a built in search engine that indexed the programs contained on the disc. The whole system worked like a much simplified version of today’s internet search engines.
The Transition to the Internet….
My transition to the Internet world came in the mid-late 1990’s. I’ve written lots of Internet related software, including news downloaders, website downloaders, picture sorters, all of which have achieved awards.