Benny

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated, adding in soundtrack support.

This feature enables certain games to be dumped as a soundtrack. Doing this brings many benefits: the tracks will have more descriptive names, will be tagged with artist/album/track information and will have album art.

The idea for soundtrack support came from the excellent Laserschwert and you can read about the development of the feature here. Thanks to his hard work, this release comes with soundtrack support for all episodes of Tales of Monkey island.

Soundtrack support is controlled through a simple ini file, so people can easily add soundtrack support for other games, see the readme or forum thead for more information about this. If you make a soundtrack ini file for a game please send it to me so I can include it in the next release of the program.

If you like this new feature, remember to thank Laserschwert – the idea was his and he’s done a brilliant job making the soundtrack files.

Download it here.

[Edit – Beta 5 is now released – see here]

After a huge amount of work, I’m now releasing Beta 4 of USB Disk Ejector. There are many changes since the last beta and barring any show-stopping bugs this version should become the final release.

I would be extremely grateful if people could test this and report their experiences in the comments below.

Please read this first:

This beta is considered fully-functional – i.e. everything should work. There have been many changes since the last beta, but here are the main ones:

• Command line switches have been fixed and changed. Some have been added and some removed. Available command line switches are:
• /? – shows all command line switches
• /NOSAVE – Any changes made to options are not saved, no cfg file will be created. But if theres USB_Disk_Eject.cfg in the path then options will be read from it. Useful in situations where the app is running from a read only location and wont be able to save its changes to a cfg file, or if you’re giving people controlled access to the app and don’t want them changing any options.
• /REMOVETHIS – Ejects the drive that the program is running from. Eg if the program is run from a usb stick on drive G then drive G would be ejected.
• /REMOVELABEL – Ejects the drive with the specified label. Partial label matching is possible if a wildcard (*) is used. Eg /REMOVELABEL *BEN would eject a drive that had Ben in its label (eg Ben’s Pen Drive).
• /REMOVELETTER – Ejects the drive with the specified drive letter.
• /REMOVEMOUNTPOINT – Ejects the drive with the specified mountpoint.
• /REMOVENAME – Ejects the drive with the specified name. Partial name matching is possible if a wildcard (*) is used. Eg /REMOVENAME *SANDISK would eject a drive that had Sandisk in its name.

• Rewritten options dialog – should be much clearer.
• Docking option – to keep app snapped to a corner of the screen.
• Improved communication – the app uses balloon hints to communicate with the user by default. However if balloonhints arent available it will use a messagebox instead – the messagebox will automatically close after 5 seconds.
• Audio notification option – to allow sounds indicating a successful or failed ejection.
• Hotkeys now work correctly and more hotkey actions such as ejecting by drive label and mountpoint are available.

Things that wont work in this beta:

Card reader support is disabled. Ejecting a card reader will eject the device not the card in this beta. I’ll be looking into card reader support again once I’ve got the next stable release done.

Windows 2000 support may be broken. I’ve tried my best to ensure that the new features support Windows 2000 but this may not be the case. I don’t have 2000 to be able to test this.

[Edit] I’ve updated the download with a new build that wont show most card readers. If you downloaded the app before this message appeared please redownload it.

[Edit – Beta 5 is now released – see here]

Amazingly I’ve managed to keep to a schedule and as promised I’m releasing Beta 3 of USB Disk Ejector.

[Edit] Beta 4 is now released – see here.

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Good news and bad news on the USB Disk Ejector front. The good news is that I’ve been preparing a new build in preparation for another beta release and (finally) a new stable build. The bad news is that due to a combination of stupidity and a wonky backup strategy I’ve lost most of the code I’ve written since October.

I fully release that its been a long time since the last beta and an even longer time since the last stable build. The problem has been my bad coding strategy, instead of using subversion properly I’ve been keeping changes local and instead of making incremental changes I’ve been coding in chunks shoving in lots of new features without fully testing them and then not doing any coding for a month or so. Consequently the code is a mess. On the positive side – I’ve added the mountpoint support that people asked for, however that broke a lot of the existing code that relied on drive letters and I’ve not fully fixed everything yet. I can only apologise to those who’ve been waiting for new builds – however I’m going to try and fix this.

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I’m quite busy at the moment, however I’ve had this sitting on my hard drive for quite a while in a mostly finished state so I’m releasing it now as a beta version. The application was almost completely rewritten so a few features that were in the previous version aren’t yet in this.

New in this version:

• Support for all currently available Telltale games, up to TMI Episode 4
• Complete annotation support for all games.
• A lot of bug fixes.

There are a few issues with this version, mainly things that I haven’t had time to implement. A popup will inform you of these when you run the application.

As always with my Telltale-related applications you must have bought the games to use this.

Download it here.

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated.

It now supports all currently available Telltale games.

This version adds support for Tales of Monkey Island Episode 1, Wallace and Gromit Episodes 1-3 and Strongbad Episode 5.? It also fixes an issue with filenames when extracting; all saved music now has the correct filename rather than “trackxx” as was previously the case with the Strongbad games. See the readme for more information.

Many thanks to Luigi Auriemma for his work on the V7 ttarch format and his updated blowfish code. TMI support would not have been possible without his work.

[Edit] Version 1.4.1 has now been released, adding support for Wallace and Gromit Episode 4 – The Bogey Man.

Download it here.

This site is now over 7 years old and its once-snazzy design is getting a bit dated. Its probably about time this page displayed correctly in Internet Explorer too.

In short – I’m looking for a new design for this site.? I could do it myself, but the internet wouldn’t thank me when I produced a design that burned everyone’s eyes off. That means I’m looking for help.

I need someone willing to update my existing WordPress theme or even to discard it and produce a new design. I dont have many requirements – you’d have pretty much free reign to do what you liked.

Experience has taught me to be pessimistic with requests like this, but its worth a try. Help me out – you know you want to.

Contact me.

I’ve started using Twitter. Follow my inane ramblings here.

[Edit] Beta 4 is now released see here.

Its been almost 5 months since I said it was my intention to release new beta versions of USB Disk Ejector “as often as I can”. Sorry about that everyone, but 1.2 beta 2 is finally here.

There has been a huge number of features added and bugs quashed so I’m looking for as much testing and feedback as possible. So far its only been very briefly tested by me on Vista 32 bit. Please, please let me know how this beta performs. I want to know about problems, bugs, quirks, or even if it all works perfectly. Contact me, post in the comments or add an item to the issues tracker. Please include as much information as possible, including your version of Windows and if possible, the steps to reproduce a bug.

Click ‘Read the rest of this entry’ for the list of new features and the download link.

Read more

I’ve now created Google Code pages and uploaded the source for more of my programs:

Escape From Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Curse of Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Grim Fandango Setup and Launcher

Two things became clear during this process: one – I should have done this years ago, its a lot simpler than I thought, and two – I write some really bad code. Some of it was from 2002, a time when just getting a program to compile was my big achievement.

I’ve done my best to clean it up and in doing so I’ve moved all string constants into a separate unit – this should make it much easier for people to make translations. Anyone looking to update the installers can look at Hoanzl’s work for ideas.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any queries. If anyone has any patches or changes they want to merge into any of the repositories, just let me know and I’ll either do it myself or add you as a project member.