XSTEP, ARCHIVAL VERSION

In November 2020, I was asked if I still had a copy of XStep, the DWI/Stepmania
stepfile editor that I wrote almost twenty years earlier.

Yes, I do -- or at least, I have a copy of the compiled .exe. The source code
is long gone. My initial reaction was to let it rest in peace -- however, I
recognise that a few folks want to archive it, which seems reasonable enough.

The thing is, XStep is bad. If I remember rightly, I wrote it because no-one
else had built a stepfile editor yet. But I was utterly unqualified: the
interface is appalling, the code was unmaintainable spaghetti, and the whole
thing relies on Winamp 2.x for audio playback. I was learning as I wrote it,
and the result is an inadequate dead-end mess. It doesn't even load stepfiles
-- it can export to them, but its native format is literally just a dump of
everything in the program's memory. I strongly suspect there are devastating
security bugs lurking in the "import" routine, because it basically just loaded
the file right into its memory. As ever, no warranty here, this may turn out to
be dangerous.

Also, by the time I stopped working on it, I hated it: I was at university, and
supporting it was a millstone round my neck. There's a tetchy note in the help
section because, if I remember right, I was very much done with providing free
tech support!

But, to my surprise, the program does still work on Windows 10. Microsoft is
pretty good at backwards compatibility.

In this ZIP file is the final release of XStep from 2003, almost as it was
originally published. I've made one change to it: I've wiped my old contact
information from it. It's not been recompiled or edited: I just used a hex
editor on the .exe file and changed the strings to underscores for the sake of
my privacy.

So here's XStep. If you have fond memories of it, well, I'm glad someone does!

                                -- Tom Scott
                                   November 2020