USB Disk Ejector Updated – Version 1.1.1

I’ve released a small, interim update to the USB Disk Ejector. It fixes a bug where the /Showeject switch was ignored when combined with /Removethis.

In order to justify a new release I’ve also included two requested features. Firstly, proper Windows 2000 support. I know some people were disappointed that the old version didn’t work on Win2K – well now it does (for real this time). Secondly, displaying disk/volume labels. If you’ve given a disk a name it will now be displayed in bold and you can see an example of this in the screenshot below.

I still don’t know exactly when the next version of the program will be released. I don’t have much free time at the moment but I’m still slowly working on it. You can see a mind-map containing all the proposed features for the next version here.

As always, feel free to get in touch with me via my contact form if you have any problems or feature requests that aren’t on the mind-map.

Download it here.

[Update] It seems that some people have issues using the program when they have network drives that aren’t accessible. I think I’ve identified the problem and I’m just waiting for a few more people to test the fix. I’ll be releasing an updated/fixed version soon.

USB Disk Ejector

Sam and Max Windows 2000 Patches

I’m now hosting some patches that allow Sam and Max Season 2 to run under Windows 2000.

Just to make it clear – I didnt make these patches, Maks Verver did. I am just hosting them on his behalf.

Also note that these are unofficial patches that are not authorized or supported by Telltale Games. If you encounter problems running one of the games on Windows 2000, you should reinstall the game on a supported operating system before contacting Telltale Games for technical support.

Get them here.

USB Disk Ejector – A Status Update

Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Over the last few weeks, various big sites linked to the USB Disk Ejector. Many thousands of people have now downloaded the program and I am thrilled at the thought that one of my programs is in use by people all over the world.

Many thanks to those that have donated, I really appreciate it. You should all have had a thank you email, if you haven’t received one it may have been caught in your spam filter. Thanks also to those that commented or emailed me about the program. All feedback is useful and although I may not be able to implement every suggestion I will do my best to fulfil most requests.

A list of the ideas and proposed features for the new version can be found here. It was compiled from all the requests people sent me, along with a few ideas of my own. Work on the next version is happening slowly; unfortunately all the interest in the program coincided with a very busy period of my life. I have very little free time at the moment and this will be the case up until the end of April. After that I hope to be able to put in a lot more work on the program and get a new version released fairly quickly.

Until then, you can subscribe to my RSS feed here and please feel free to get in touch with me via my contact form if you have any problems or requests that aren’t featured on the list.

Quick and Easy Week – The Epilogue

I’ve now uploaded the source code to all the programs released this week. I offer no guarantees on its quality, some of it is based on 5 year old code from when I was learning programming and a lot of it is ongoing development code, peppered with todo’s. Much of it shows a disregard for coding conventions and I haven’t yet found the time to refactor and clean it up. In short, your mileage may vary.

Download it here.

Quick and Easy week is now over, many thanks to those who’ve offered words of encouragement. Should you want to show your appreciation and support my work, you can do so via a paypal donation. The ugly paypal button on the right of the page will let you do this. I hope that people find the tools useful; as always people can contact me via the forums or my contact page if they have any problems or suggestions.

Quick And Easy Week – Day 7: USB Disk Ejector

Quick and Easy week comes to a close with the USB Disk Ejector.

This was originally a program that I wrote for my own use and released just to see if anyone found it useful. Apparently people did and it was surprisingly popular.

In response to user requests I’ve now beefed it up significantly. This new version has been completely re-written and has many new features. It now works on Vista, can run as a command line application and can eject drives from the command line based on drive letter, drive name or partial drive name.

The new command line options make it especially suitable for use with a flash/pen drive, especially if you use a menu such as PStart or the Portable Apps launcher. Eg. I have PStart setup to run the program with the command line option “/EJECTTHIS’. When I run it, the program loads silently, ejects the pen drive and exits. This works regardless of the drive letter that Windows assigns the drive. I strongly recommended that you check out the readme for more information on the new command line options and how they can be used.

New in version 1.1:

  • Now works on Windows Vista. It’s only been tested on XP and Vista but should work with earlier versions of Windows too.
  • Changed to ‘silent ejection’ by default. There are now no messages shown when a device is successfully ejected, messages are only shown when there is an error and the eject fails.
  • The keyboard can now be used to eject drives (press enter).
  • Completely reworked the command line options, the old ones were removed and new ones added. See the rest of the readme for more information on these.
  • Drives can now be ejected entirely from the command line. You can specify a drive letter, drive name, or partial drive name.
  • Mobile mode has been removed, its now automatic. The program will restart itself in mobile mode when appropriate.
  • Completely rewrote the drive scanning code. USB devices that dont identify themselves as removable disks can now be managed by the program.
  • Uses Vista fonts when running under Vista.

Download it here.


USB Disk Ejector

Quick And Easy Week – Day 6: Escape From Monkey Island Launcher and Escape From Monkey Island Setup

Day 6 brings the last of the launcher and setup programs.

Escape From Monkey Island Launcher has been updated to version 1.5. The resolution patch has been reworked to make it much faster, the 6 different language versions of EMI are now better supported and Vista/64 bit Windows support has been added. The full list of changes can be seen below:

New in version 1.5:

  • Resolution patch reworked: It’s now much faster. On most systems it will only take 1 or 2 seconds to apply – compared to 30 seconds in previous versions.
  • Added support for the 6 different language versions of EMI: The launcher will now download and install the appropriate patch when prompted. Previously only the English patch was supported.
  • Added features from the original Lucasarts launcher. Added buttons to switch between Direct3D/OpenGL and 16 bit/32 bit colour. The original launcher now wont run on some systems so it was necessary to include these features.
  • Cosmetic changes: Interface redesigned, text and icons made clearer, changed the launcher images.
  • Vista compatibility: The launcher now automatically prompts to run as administrator when its started, the program icon now includes all sizes up to 256×256.
  • Fixed a small memory leak.
  • Now uses the excellent EMI icon created by Thanius.
  • 64 bit versions of Windows are now officially supported. The launcher has been tested on XP64 and Vista64.
  • Old versions of Windows are no longer officially supported. Versions before XP (95/98/ME/2000) should be fine but the launcher hasn’t been tested with them.

Download it here.

Escape From Monkey Island Setup is a new tool. Its a replacement installer (setup program) for Escape From Monkey Island. The installer that comes with the game can be problematic with newer versions of Windows and refuses to work at all on 64 bit Windows. This installer doesn’t have those problems and comes with the above-mentioned Escape From Monkey Island Launcher.

Download it here.

EMI LauncherEscape From Monkey Island Setup

Quick And Easy Week – Day 5: Curse of Monkey Island Launcher and Curse of Monkey Island Setup

Day 5 features two tools – one updated and one new.

The Curse of Monkey Island Launcher has been updated. Its had a slight redesign to make it easier to use, has full Vista compatibility and now supports 64 bit versions of Windows. The full list of changes can be seen below.

New in version 2.5

  • Cosmetic changes: Interface redesigned, text and icons made clearer, changed the launcher images.
  • Vista compatibility: The launcher now automatically prompts to run as administrator when its started, the program icon now includes all sizes up to 256×256 and if running on Vista the launcher now uses vista fonts.
  • Fixed a small memory leak.
  • Now uses the excellent CMI icon created by Thanius.
  • 64 bit versions of Windows are now officially supported. The launcher has been tested on XP64 and Vista64.
  • Old versions of Windows are no longer officially supported. Versions before XP (95/98/ME/2000) should be fine but the launcher hasn’t been tested with them.
  • The cutscene fix feature has been removed: Newer versions of DirectX and newer versions of Windows mean that the fast cutscene bug no longer occurs.

Download it here.

Curse of Monkey Island Setup is the new tool. Its a replacement installer (setup program) for the Curse of Monkey Island. The installer that comes with the game can be problematic with newer versions of Windows and refuses to work at all on 64 bit Windows. This installer doesn’t have those problems and comes with the above-mentioned Curse of Monkey Island Launcher.

Download it here.

CMI LauncherCurse of Monkey Island Setup

Quick And Easy Week – Day 4: Psychonauts Saved Game Editor

Thursday’s tool is the Psychonauts Saved Game Editor.

There’s been some minor cosmetic changes, Vista compatibility has been tweaked and 25 new common tasks have been added. These allow you to change the ammount of ammo you have, give yourself items such as the cobweb duster, enable/disable Raz’s powers and much more. Many thanks to Bosam and Tobi Lukefisher for sending me these new tasks.

Download it here.

Psychonauts Saved Game Editor

Quick And Easy Week – Day 3: Telltale Speech Extractor

Day 3 sees the release of a new tool – Telltale Speech Extractor.

It enables you to rip the voices and sfx from all games released by Telltale Games (yes that means Sam and Max).

Download it here.

The tool plays the sounds, lets you save them as wav or mp3, can filter them by character and lets you search for specific dialogue. In short, it makes it really easy to browse and search the sounds, especially if you know what you’re looking for.

What makes this tool extra-special though, is its annotation support. See the screenshot below? See how for each sound it lists who said it and whats said? Those are annotations. To quote the readme: “Annotations are descriptive names given to sounds. They list what is said and what character says it. This allows the sounds to be easily browsed, filtered and searched“. The sounds don’t contain any textual information besides the filename, so all of that extra information has been added to the annotations, for every single game.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the annotations aren’t complete. In most games there are still around 50 sounds that don’t have annotations. Who’s going to fix this? Well hopefully you are. Annotation editing is built into the tool and its very easy to use. I just need people to finish the annotations for a game and then send me their annotation file. This is all explained in the readme, so if you’re interested in helping out, just have a look at that.

Telltale Speech Extractor

Quick And Easy Week – Day 1: Grim Fandango Launcher + Grim Fandango Setup

Here we go then…

Quick and Easy week begins with an update and a new tool. First up, Grim Fandango Launcher has been updated. Its had a redesign to make it look better, has full Vista compatibility and now supports 64 bit versions of Windows. The full list of changes can be seen below.

New in version 1.5:

  • Cosmetic changes: Interface redesigned, text and icons made clearer, changed the launcher images.
  • Vista compatibility: The launcher now automatically prompts to run as administrator when its started, the program icon now includes all sizes up to 256×256 and if running on Vista the launcher now uses vista fonts.
  • Fixed a small memory leak.
  • Now uses windows temp folder rather than Grim folder for extracted resources like the readme and patch.
  • Now uses the excellent Grim Fandango icon created by Thanius.
  • 64 bit versions of Windows are now officially supported. The launcher has been tested on XP64 and Vista64.
  • Old versions of Windows are no longer officially supported. Versions before XP (95/98/ME/2000) should be fine but the launcher hasn’t been tested with them.

Download it here.

The new tool is Grim Fandango Setup. Its a replacement installer (setup program) for Grim Fandango. The installer that comes with the game can be problematic with newer versions of Windows and refuses to work at all on 64 bit Windows. This installer doesn’t have those problems and comes with the above-mentioned Grim Fandango Launcher.

Download it here.

Grim Fandango LauncherGrim Fandango Setup

Quick and Easy Week – The Revenge

Starting next Monday (October 29th), Quick and Easy Week will begin. Every day I’ll release a new tool or an update to an existing one.

If you’ve never visited this site before, then take a look at the software page. Here you’ll find a variety of utilities to fix, edit, extract and enhance games. The tools tend to reflect my interests so are mainly concerned with adventure or adventure-related games from Lucasarts, Telltale Games and Doublefine Productions.

I’m not going to reveal which tools are getting an update, or what the new tools are but if you take a look at the software page and previous news posts you’ll probably be able to guess. Anyone who’s contacted me over the past year to request a feature should be pleased. I’ve gone through all my emails and tried to fix every bug and implement every suggestion that was feasible. Vista users and those with 64 bit versions of Windows will also benefit, all tools released next week will be fully compatible with these.

As always the tools will be completely free, but should you want to show your appreciation and support my work, you can do so via a paypal donation. You can also help by spreading the word about Quick And Easy Week; Digg this post, start a thread on a forum, tell your friends – it all helps.

Long time visitors will recall that this has happened before. The last Quick and Easy Week was a nostalgia-inducing three years ago. This one will be bigger and better, I promise. Or your money back.

Contact/Email Problems

I’ve just discovered that a lot of the legitimate email sent via my contact page is being incorrectly labelled as spam by my email provider. This means that I haven’t received some of the emails that people have sent.

I’ve now looked though my spam folder and replied to those people whose emails were trapped in spam limbo. Some older emails though may be gone for good, so if you’ve contacted me over the past few months and not received a reply – please contact me again.

Steps have now been taken to fix this problem. Sorry about that.

Tell Me Your Problems

At some point in the near future I’m going to update my various Lucasarts game launchers to try and address issues with newer operating systems. To do this though, I need more information about the problems that people are experiencing.

Please contact me if you are having or have experienced problems with Monkey Island 3 (CMI), Monkey Island 4 (EMI) or Grim Fandango. I’m particularly interested in hearing from people using Windows Vista, Windows XP 64 and Windows Vista 64.

I want to know

  • Does the game’s installer work correctly? (There have been some reports that they don’t work on 64 bit versions of Windows)
  • Does the game load and run correctly?
  • Do my launchers work correctly? (CMI Launcher, EMI Launcher and Grim Fandango Launcher).
  • If you have a dual-core CPU, has this caused problems? Did these go away when you disabled dual core for the installer/game?

Please try and give me as much information about the problems and about your pc as possible. Make especially sure to mention what version of Windows you have.

What are you waiting for? Tell me your problems now.

Sam and Max and Bone Debug Menus

Heads up tinkerers, hackers and the 3 regular visitors to this site; I’ve just found out how to bring up the debug menu in recent Telltale games and now I’m going to show you how to do it too.

The debug menu lets you skip to any section of a game, complete with the appropriate inventory items. It’s therefore useful if you’ve lost your saved game or want to replay a specific section to see what you’ve missed. By ‘recent games’ I mean Bone 1+2 and all episodes of Sam and Max Season One. You’ll need to have bought and registered the games as the debug menu only works on registered versions. Activating the menu is a simple process.

In the Sam and Max games:

  • Hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and double click on the arrow button (the button that opens the menu).

In the Bone games:

  • Bring up the menu screen (by pressing escape) hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and click on the ‘quit’ option.

Cow Race Debug MenuOut From Boneville Debug MenuReality 2.0 Debug Menu

I found out how to activate the menu a long time ago; that is to say I worked out what had to be done to activate it, but I didn’t know the required key combination. Earlier today I was playing through the final episode of Sam and Max when I remembered the debug menu. In the past I’d tried a number of different key combinations..surely I’d tried the most obvious one? Without any expectations I pressed shift and D, double clicked and…nothing. I tried it with control and…aha. There’s no substitute for a lucky guess.