About

Meusesoft

Hi! Let me introduce myself. My name is Rainier and I am a hobby developer from the Netherlands. I started in my teens on the MSX computer system. Later I moved to developing for Windows, but the last years also Android and iOS got into the mix. Below you'll find the list of the applications I developed during the years. The source code of some of the applications are published on GitHub. Hopefully it will help other developers to see how I built some of the functionalities (or show how not to built it ;-) ). Please contact me if you have any questions: rainier@meusesoft.com

2016 Tennis Statistics - Windows, Android, iOS, Tizen

My attention shifted to Android and Android Wear for the smartwatch Tennis app when Pebble Time ended. Tennis Statistics is developed in Xamarin from the start to be able to publish it to all the major platforms. The Windows version was actually the first that was finished. Developing the iOS version took more time because I had to get acquinted with the platform. I didn't use Xamarin Forms for the user interface because it was slower than using the native controls.

Tool Tennis Statistics screenshot

2015 Pebble Time Manager - Windows Mobile

I found Windows Phone and Mobile interesting; it had interesting features and was easy to develop for with the tools I was familiar with. At one point I came across the Pebble Time smartwatch and the community which was working on porting the tools to Windows Phone. I decided to acquire a Pebble myself and started working on a Tennis app (another hobby of mine). In the end the result was Pebble Time Manager. It was quite successful at one point with a couple of thousand users. With the end of Windows Mobile and the acquisition of Pebble by Fitbit the development stopped.

Tool Tennis Statistics screenshot

2013 Keyword Based Testing - Windows

At work I got involved in test management and test automation. We evaluated some professional tools and used some tools which were based on selenium. I started working on this project to test my own web and Windows application in a structured automatic way. In the end I stopped developing it because a lot of time went into maintaining the integration of 3rd party modules. Also my focus shifted towards Windows Phone and Mobile.

Tool Keyword Based Testing screenshot

2006 Card 3D - Windows

This was an experiment for me. On the one side learning about 3D programming with OpenGL and on the other side to see what the experience would be as a player. I got to a working demo but in the end I didn't like the way it felt when I was playing.

Tool Copying Machine 3 screenshot

2005 Copying Machine 3 - Windows

The third rewrite of the code. I switched to Microsoft Visual Studio as the development platform. I wanted to be independent of the direction the development platform and libraries that came with Borland (OWL or VCL anyone?). VS in combination with MFC was the dominant combination at the time on the internet. I developed and supported Copying Machine 3 actively for almost 10 years. And still bugs are fixed.

Tool Copying Machine 3 screenshot

2002 OCR - Windows

Copying Machine got me interested in the technology of processing images. Object Character Recognition was a feature I wanted to add to Copying Machine and I found it very challenging to research the topic. There was an open source module available on the internet but I wanted to use a different approach and see what would be possible with a neural network. Support for multiple cores was one of the features I wanted to add for performance. In the end I used the Tesseract engine. OCR got closer than I anticipated at the beginning. The problem I didn't solve was the problem of connected characters due to poor scan quality. This was in my opinion the main reason the results were not on par with other tools like Tesseract.

Tool OCR screenshot

2000 Copying Machine 2 - Windows

Copying Machine was a complete rewrite of Copying Machine. I switched from Borland C++ to Borland C++ Builder as development platform. A lot of work went into the user interface but also new functionalities were added to make it more user friendly. It was released as shareware.

Tool Copying Machine 2 screenshot

2000 Janitor - Windows

Via some friends I got to know this card game. Janitor was a nice change to make a card game one more. In principle it had the same setup as 31 and was just fun to make.

Game Janitor screenshot

1997 Copying Machine - Windows

In this period we got our first flatbed scanner. The application that was shipped with it was buggy and I believe shareware. As a hobby programmer I wanted to know how to program the scanner. At the time there was a lot information available on the internet about TWAIN. I spend a lot of time figuring it out and in the end made Copying Machine. I shared it on the internet via several freeware websites. It was successful from the start and got a lot of feedback from user.

Tool Copying Machine screenshot

1996 Time Clock - Windows

Time Clock was a tool to start application or tasks in Windows on certain times. I don't recall why I made it. Now you would use task scheduler that comes standard in Windows. I learned a lot about processes in Windows and API's to terminate them or stop them gracefully. It was published on a CD-ROM of a dutch PC magazine in 1998.

Tool Time Clock screenshot

1996 File Monitor - Windows

A neat little tool I used a lot back in the day. It shows at byte level the contents of a file. Much like WireShark does for network traffic.

Tool File Monitor screenshot

1995 31 - Windows

My first Windows app(lication). Coming from Basic, Pascal and Machine Language, programming for Windows was a completely different experience. I had to get familiar with the messaging and event-driven way of working. Also working with graphics was very different. But it was a good start of understanding Windows.

Game 31 for Windows screenshot

1994 HD-Menu 3 - MSX-DOS 2

The last application I made for MSX. HD-Menu 3 was meant to be a user friendly menu or DOS alternative. It was entirely built in a graphical user interface. It worked quite well and had a lot of basic apps included. Also there was a possibility for other developers to add apps. But in the end I kept using HD-Menu 2 myself. It was faster to use.

Tool HD-Menu 3 screenshot

1993 31 - MSX2

I played this card game a lot with class mates in high school. The MSX version of this game was my first attempt to build different strategies into a CPU player. The fun part of this game was also building it as a multiplayer game. Two MSX could be connected via a cross-linked joystick cable. The performance was poor but enough for this game.

Game 31 screenshot

1993 MSX2Base - MSX-DOS 2

MSX2Base is a (simple) database tool for MSX-DOS 2. Multiple databases were available for MSX but none of them could use the features of hard drives and memory extensions. That was for me the motivation to start building it. In hindsight it was the largest application I made for MSX. Just like Ansi-Editor was it sold via MSX Club Gouda.

Tool MSX2Base screenshot

1993 DirSort - MSX-DOS 2

Another tool for MSX-DOS. When you use the dir command on large folders the order how files were presented seemed random. With DirSort you could order the files on file name, creation date etc.

Tool DirSort screenshot

1992 Flight - MSX2

Another game I didn't finish. This was a game where you flew a plane over a large city. You could move in all directions and had a range of weapons to defend yourself against enemies or solve puzzles. The objective of the game is not clear to me anymore. I think that was the reason I never finished it.

Game Flight screenshot

1992 Ansi-Editor - MSX-DOS 2

These days bulletin board system (BBS) were popular in the MSX community. Traditionally they were text driven with just two colors. When ANSI came available I wanted to have an editor with specific functionalities to make texts for BBS and manuals more easily. It was quite a challenge because I didn't make a text editor before. I tried a lot of different approaches to make it perform acceptable. Ansi-Editor was eventually sold via MSX Club Gouda in the Netherlands.

Tool Ansi-Editor screenshot

1992 Help - MSX2

This would have been the sequel to Troubles in Town. A graphical adventure game with lots of different places to visit. There was a forest, a town and a military complex. A range of objects to use and day and night pattern. I don't remember why I stop developing it. Looking back at it now it had potential.

Game Help screenshot

1992 Bestandsbeheerder - MSX-DOS 2

Just like HD-Menu, Bestandsbeheerder (File Manager) was a tool I missed in MSX-DOS; an easy way to copy, move and rename batches of files. Bestandsbeheerder also had a feature to copy the contents of an entire disk to memory and write it to a second disk. At the time a lot of MSX computers had just one disk drive. Copying files would mean swapping two disks multiples times. This feature only worked if the MSX had enough internal memory.

Tool Bestandsbeheerder screenshot

1991 HD-Menu - MSX-DOS 2

In this period I started using MSX-DOS 2 in combination with a hard drive. The command-line tools were great but what I missed was a simple tool to see the contents of folders and start or view apps and documents. This was the inspiration to make HD-Menu.

1990 Troubles in Town - MSX2

This is an adventure game where the hero needs to solve a problem. It was my first product made in Z80 machine language. This was the only way on MSX with its limited resources to make games like this. I played it lately again after years. They game play was repetitive but the map had enough variation to make it interesting (and frustrating :-)). If you want to see it, you can open the map here.
This was my entry for a competition of a dutch MSX magazine. The prize I won was a hard drive.

Game Troubles in Town screenshot

1989 Gun master - MSX

This game was inspired by the game MSX Policy Academy. I made my own version of it in MSX-Basic. It became clear that MSX-Basic had its limitations for making games.

Game Gun master screenshot

1989 Hands of evil - MSX

Another shoot 'em up game. Just shoot all the aliens before they reach you and destroy your ship. Also made in MSX-Basic.

Game Hands of evil screenshot

1989 Air - MSX2

An old-style shoot 'em up game. The object was to fly the helicopter to another landing site. In between you were attacked by enemies. They were simple to defeat. The game was build like a lot of other MSX-Basic games. One of the things I did a lot in this period was drawing sprites and translate the pixels to hex values. A good way to learn how binary values work.

Game Air screenshot

1988 Jungle - MSX

The last text adventure I did and had some nice enhancements; like different background colors based on the place you were and some little illustrations. This was published as a listing in a dutch MSX magazine in 1989.

Game Jungle screenshot

1987 Kluisdeur - MSX

The next project was more graphical. The objective was to decide if you want to open the door of the vault. By a random mechanism you would lose or win money. The game required no skills just luck!

Game Kluisdeur screenshot

1987 Pyramide - MSX

The first program I finished. Inspired by a text adventure in a book with several MSX-Basic games (old-style open-source). It was a simple game but a lot of effort went into figuring out how to create a custom font. That was fun.

Game Pyramide screenshot