Well met! If there was ever any doubt about my nerdy ways - past or present - this should clear it up. This is my AD&D 2nd Edition "Character Creation System"... a.k.a. The CHreator (version 1.00B for beta). :-)
According to the file dates, I compiled the final version of this at 12:42am, Sept 20th, 1995.
Many such editors existed, but they were hard to distribute and come by. Apparently I found it easier to write my own than download one from the local BBS over dial-up. Anyone remember Legend of the Red Dragon BBS game?
Anyway, this bad boy only runs in DOS, and won't run in Windows 7, so I've posted screenshots (as if you would have downloaded it anyway). It does run in DOSBox just fine though (which I happened to already have for all of my other nostalgic software).
Most similar character editors used the text console based interfaces... which is fine and all, but it wasn't good enough for me. I wanted to go VGA! This was before the days of ubiquitous (read "free") component frameworks. I just had a plain old Borland C compiler (I'm sure it was a legal copy, courtesy of my high school) and a basic graphics API. Every screen, line, box and control had to be hand coded.
I even had to make the cursor blink myself (the cursor was a red blinking asterisk character).
I made my own controls for text input, combo boxes (see the alignment field in the 3rd screen -- these were proper combo boxes, with text entry) and auto-populating look-up tables for attribute modifiers.
It stored the characters in some strange binary format with a *.D&D extension (creative!), and printed a 2 page character sheet spaced perfectly on old-school dot-matrix printers.
Then Windows 95 came out, DOS died and this went nowhere. Too bad I didn't write it four years later.. I'm sure I could have found a venture capitalist to throw a few million into this thing... :-)
** Special thanks to Colin for buying better hard drives than I do... I lost this many years ago in a drive crash, along with the source and all of my other DOS apps. I don't suppose anyone has a copy of my old VGA DOS menu? Remember DOS menus? Man... DOS was fun.
And if you read this far, you deserve a bonus from 1995... good times. Look! That guy is using a netbook in 1995!
