Erasure Wars Agency

The Erasure Wars Agency is a name that represents me and my works, whose quantity I expect will grow over time.

If you’re looking for Lost Arcade Classics, see here.

The original VGR’s Homepage is not as useful as it used to be. Much of the content was lost when my original ISP was bought by Verio, who trashed all the pages. I then discovered I had no recent backups, so there are many missing pages and images. But some of the material is still there. You can still download Indenture there, as well as from many other places on the web.

Contents

Games

Avalon is an interactive multiplayer word game, based on a well‐known board game.

MARE is a MAME front‐end written in Java, intended to mimic all of the useful features of MAME32.

JSet is a simple Java implementation of the popular game Set. I wrote it because I saw a few Java implementations which aren’t very good, and I just know people are going conclude it’s the fault of Java.

Old MS‐DOS games:

Utilities

Repertoire (formerly “JCharMap”) is a Unicode Character Viewer which is mostly a clone of gucharmap, but it gets its character data directly from the Unicode Character Database, allowing it to be much more up to date than gucharmap, which hard‐codes copies of the character data. Repertoire also includes a lot of Unified Han information.

A simple Input Method Selection Key Editor which provides an easy way to change the keystroke which brings up the input method selection menu in Java.

An input method which implements of the 2010 revision of the ISO/IEC 9995-3 keyboard layout.

The IBUN input method is an input method for Java which allows entry of any Unicode character by typing part of its name, or its hexadecimal code point number.

Articles

Classic Gamer Magazine interviewed me back in 1999 about my game, Indenture.

Article by Sun Microsystems VP of Java development, Graham Hamilton, on Java’ design goals. It contains some of the most poignant quotes I’ve seen on software development, including:

Some thoughts on relatively recent additions to the Java development ecosphere:

Older articles

I’ve been struggling for a long time with people who refuse to learn object‐oriented programming. There is a gigantic school of programmers who have learned things the old way and are certain that they have learned all they’ll ever need to know. They call object‐oriented programming pointless and useless, because they think they have tried it when in fact they didn’t even come close. More here on object‐oriented design and development.

People have a tendency to use new tools the same way they used old tools, however inappropriate the usage may be. ant has this problem a lot, and a badly written ant build file makes other developers pay the price in productivity. Here are some guidelines on how to write a good one.

Far too many software vendors are making “web applications” out of interfaces that really shouldn’t be in a browser.

An in‐depth discussion and demonstration about a truly bad idea in the Java Swing library: Editable table cells.

A short list of good PC games lost to obscurity.