+1000 Or referring to an app as "a software". Genius.

A colleague set me this a while back, and in addition, in his version, the answers would be either "ja" or "da" and you don't know which means yes and which means no. I never arrived at the solution myself, although it is possible and I do have it here if anyone wants it :) Joel.

Dell still offer some of their laptops with Windows XP. I recently bought one from them because I didn't fancy Vista either. Joel.

It has to be JetAudio for me. Simple, and it doesn't take up much room on your screen in the compact mode :)

Hi Marc, There's a relatively new product on the market, which I think might be called Notion. I haven't tried it myself, but it comes with a built in orchestral sample set and a soft synth, so it can play back scores with a decent level of realism. As someone else has mentioned, Sibelius is very popular for professional scoring, but most good sequencers (Cubase / Logic / Cakewalk) also offer very good scoring facilities, in addition to full audio recording and mixing capabilities if those might be of use to your son.

It's hard to know for sure without knowing what bmpsize is, but I would guess that bmpsize is less than 5. When you call memset, you are setting the five bytes starting at the address of bmpsrc to 0xff. If you have allocated less than five bytes, you will be writing to memory you do not own :)

You should check out the PopCap engine... It's ideal for 2d games, and you can download the source for free if I remember correctly (although there's some arrangement limiting the publishing / distribution of games made using this engine through PopCap themselves). Incidentally, DirectDraw has been deprecated for the last few DirectX releases. You'll need to use Direct3D now (which in the case of 2D games, could be a little like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut) :) Hope this helps, Joel.

I've pondered this matter before too. Well done for bringing it up here :) I attended the East Sussex Academy of Music before deciding that programming would provide a more steady income. I've been working as a programmer for a game developer in the UK for the last five years. A large proportion of the other programmers I work with are also proficient in at least one musical instrument. My main instrument is the piano (ABRSM Grade VIII), but I also play drums, bass, clarinet, and a bit of guitar. Merry Christmas to all at CP :-D Joel.

You need to do if(strlen(TestString) == 0) or if(strcmp(TestString, "") == 0) Remember that your string will not be initialised when you declare it though, so neither test is valid until you've put something into the string (NULL for the first character at the very least). Or you can do the following... memset(&TestString[0], 0, sizeof(TestString)); Hope this helps, Joel.

Are you in Release config? that's a classic mistake :) Also, check you don't have a return above these statements in the same scope - the compiler will consider this redundant code. Hope this helps :)