It’s free! Woo!
MicroSoft has woken up to the benefits of a strong “hobbyist” community, and they’re giving away Visual Studio .NET in an “Express” Edition. It will do pretty much everything us home-brew guys want.
There’s a bunch of editions – web, Visual Basic, C++, C#, J#, SQL Server. I grabbed the C++ and C# ones, and then tried to compile Le Putty, which failed spectacularly.
Which turned out to be caused by the “Express” Edition allowing one to build .NET applications, but not Win32 applications. The good news is it’s not been crippled, it just isn’t configured to build Win32 apps out-of-the-box.
So here’s what you do:
Grab and install Visual Studio Express 2005 Beta 2
Grab and install the MicroSoft Platform SDK
Then follow some rather elaborate instructions, keeping in mind that the SDK actually installs in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\ by default, not C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK\
Le Putty compiles now, and I can see it crash and have VC++ jump right to the code line where it crashed. Sweet. Still haven’t figured out why it crashes – which is what prompted this whole installation madness – but I will.
Ohhh — I could dig out accrete code again. Be still, my beating heart. Then again — haha, it now exists as an applet! Awesome. Never mind that then.
Thorsten on (mostly) Tech 
You still have the source we erm… developed way back when? To be honest, I still believe all versions of Accrete I’ve seen so far employ heavily idealised models for the toroid slices when handling the dustbands – but I simply can’t be arsed to do the integrations in order to eliminate the errors introduced by this. 😛
I still believe we did some, as you said, awsome coding – what with using the mrandom wrapper and removing the limitation of primary stellar bodies to the main sequence.
Ahem. If you DO feel geeky, though, you could… port it to Python, maybe? *nudge nudge*
Oh, wow. I found a program that claims it can read ProDOS disks if they are connected to a PC SCSI adapter. And I still have my old IIgs SCSI disks, and I have an old PCI SCSI adapter I am no longer using.
And it can, in actual fact, read my disk! And it’s got the Accrete source on it! *OMGASMS*
Checking the HFS partitions on this disk will be more of a challenge, but I have a feeling Linux might help with that.