About the author

I’m from England. Known on the internet as ‘Benny’ my hobbies include existing and breathing.

History

The history of Quick and Easy Software is long and boring. So this entire page is incredibly self-indulgent.

Sometime in early 2002 I went to play some of my old Lucasarts adventure games on my shiny new XP system. To my dismay they either wouldn’t play, or played – but without sound. I set about hunting down a solution and eventually came across VDMSound. After a lot of tweaking and testing I eventually managed to get most of my games working with sound, I was pleased. So pleased in fact that I assembled my configuration files and options into a few bat files and decided to release it. The ‘tool’ was named ‘Lec Quick and Easy’ because you just had to run a bat file rather than mess with VDMSound for ages. It seemed quick and easy to me anyway.

Over the next few months I continued to release updated versions, each time supporting more games. I had always wanted to learn to code and so set about teaching myself Visual Basic, with the aim of producing a gui version of Lec Quick and Easy. I eventually did this and released it. It worked, but it was obvious that I had never thought about good application design – it was an ugly duckling of a program.

Soon after Serge (of Scumm Revisited fame) introduced me to Delphi – I found this to be far better than visual basic and produced the next version of Lec Quick and Easy in Delphi. It was much, much better. At this time I discovered ScummVM. It was (even then) a great program, but was really difficult to use. It had no gui so all the options had to be specified on the command line when starting it. I created a frontend for ScummVM and released it as ‘ScummVM Quick and Easy’. This was probably a mistake – for years afterwards I got emails from people who were confused about the difference between ‘Lec Quick and Easy’ and ‘ScummVM Quick and Easy’. The situation wasn’t helped when I integrated the ScummVM frontend into Lec Quick and Easy to make it capable of running Lucasarts adventures through both VDMSound and ScummVM.

Over the next few years I branched out further, releasing various launchers for Lucasarts games that added new features. I also learned a lot more about SCUMM and game hacking and released various tools related to this. During this period ScummVM improved rapidly and there was less and less reason to use VDMSound over ScummVM. Eventually Lec Quick and Easy was phased out and ScummVM Q+E became the flagship ‘Quick and Easy’ software. ScummVM Q+E continues to be updated today and VDMSound is still supported in the little used VDMSound Q+E.

In 2005 Psychonauts was released. I had always wanted to produce a program similar to the legendary Scumm Revisited and decided to do so. Together with John_Doe (of Game File Formats) I set about working out the format of the Psychonauts datafiles and in June 2005 released Psychonauts Explorer.

In 2007 I started to edit this page, got bored and just shoved this sentence in.
In 2011 I redesigned the site, noticed this neglected page and hurriedly ignored it.
In 2020 I fixed some broken links on this page, thought about updating it for the first time in 13 years and then didnt.

Thanks to

The following people have all helped in various ways over the years. I am extremely grateful to them all:

Andrea Parker
Benjamin Haisch (John_Doe)
Blondebeard
Gabez
Huz
Jake Rodkin
JBRAA
Jeunealbert
Jimmi Thogersen (Serge`)
Khalek
Remi Olsen
Scabb (James Ellison)
Simon Boyes
Thrik
Thunderpeel
Tomas (Tomas Mahlberg)
VladR (Vlad Romascanu)