Chart Suite 3.51   by The Game Scene Chart + SOURCE CODE

WidowMaker [retired] on: February 06, 2011 http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php?topic=4911.msg65954 I have got a lot out of this forum. I think that I have writen over 20 cracktros in my career under different names and I know that this place is legal but the intros are not illegal so I feel ok about this post. The biggest project that I ever worked on were three projects.. A friend was writing a chart for the game scene, the groups that actively crack games. The scene is goverened by a set of ISO rules and each compliant release is included in the scores. The friend was working on it because a group called TNT had been producing a text based chart that was very biased towards TNT. My friend wanted to do something fairer and more in line with the old Eurochart on the Amiga, and not just a text file like the DOX report which TNT produced. Alpha One coded a menu for the Game Scene Chart but it was just an adapted keygen menu, it had compatibility problems and it crashed quite a lot. A1 was going to improve the engine but it never happened and I coded a chart engine. It was a simple one because the chart was just a single page text file but the reception was good. Jizzy did the graphics and it had smooth scrolling, it was still basic but had come a long way. In the end TNT stopped releasing the DOX report and the game scene chart remained as the only real chart for the ISO scene. Over time I have re-wrote the engine twice so it is now in its third incarnation and the engine includes; An intro with selectable SID songs. Space for 20 huge articles. 4 Selectable Modules in the main chart A suite of tools to build and compile the chart so that someone with no coding knowledge can compile it... One can lieterally drop the music files in there, edit a text file and compile it all with a couple of batch files! Many of the things that I used in building this chart came from this forum, such as ; tinyptcext bmp2raw bin2bas tinysid And many other things that had me stumped but then I found the answer here. The last issue of the charts (issue 50) was released on 31st of January. This is the final issue. So there is no need for the source to this suite to be kept away from the public and it's fitting that it should end it's life here at the place which allowed it's creation. If you want to read the game scene charts you can find most of them on defacto2.net, they seem to end up there eventually somehow... Though the subject matter probably won't interest most of you. The games scene is not the demo scene and there's much less of an overlap these days... It is rare to find a cracker who has demo coding skills and vice cersa. I have not put this source here for people to compile a spoof version of the chart, that would be totally lame and I will ask that you get my permission before you use and part of this code that could be identified as coming from my chart engine. There are a lot of snippets in there that you are welcome to take and use freely if you like mind you. You'll want to read the three instruction files, they are the ones I left for the editor of the chart. Configuration.txt allows you to change the intro and a few other things like the menu titles. Double click the batch file "format pages" to have some fun in the text formatter. Quit that then double click "compile-chart" The output file is charts.exe. Writing this application was a blast and I hope that someone finds something useful in the source. Fuck it feels wierd to let this go after all this time.. 4 years and 4 months!