History

I started programming on a C64 that I hijacked from my father at the age of 6, and later continued in autodidactic style on a Amiga 2000 using GFA-BASIC. In 1995, we switched from the then defunct Amiga to the Windows platform with a bleeding heart.

The vware project started in the year 1997, when I was writing sample code for GFA-BASIC on Windows 95, which was later published on Dale Bryant’s GFAWHelp page. Since the samples evolved into several “complete” programs, I thought I would need a name for my programming efforts – vware was born. VTools German and VTools English are still both available with complete sources. Later, I became a beta tester for the new GFA-Basic 32 language, and some of my samples were published together with the IDE and compiler.

After the release of Quake III Arena in 1999, I got into multiplayer gaming, and a member of my clan OBC created a power up timer which was used by coaches during trainings and matches. He included a mean program activation system, and the handling was quite complicated. Since this was a great chance to play with DirectX sound, I decided to code my own timer. This evolved into Clan Tools, which included a IRC score bot, a server browser, and some other tools. Clan Tools had been used by people all over the world, and got me some limited fame in the gaming community. People grew up, work begun using up their time – and like many other things, the vware project started changing.

The latest bigger coding project is NetInventory, a system that allows for querying remote Windows machines and collecting all sorts of data in a database for auditing. The system was originally written for my company, but thanks to our General Manager was later moved over to being a freeware project.

Nowadays, time for developing freeware has grown rather short, due to work, contract jobs, and a major interest for various open source projects such as CHDK, for which I created a port to the IXUS 970, and CyanogenMod, for which I maintain Sony’s Fusion3 platform.

In 2017, I co-founded a company specializing in electronics, software, and IT infrastructure – IGEL Tech GmbH, so if you have any needs in electronics, we can probably help you out!

A lot of utilities and little tools have been created over the years, either for personal use or to make tiny jobs more automated, and all the software available on this site has always been free of charge, always will be. Voluntary donations are welcome, though – one needs coffee and beer, after all!

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