The Graphics Magician^TM

Direct Express

Add Graphics, Animation, and Sound to your Windows C++ programs

Use the features of DirectX in short "Console Application" style C++ programs

Writing Windows programs that use graphics and sound generally requires a lot of programming overhead with creating the Windows interface and implementing all the features of DirectX. The Graphics Magician lets you bypass all that and add graphics, animation, and sound to programs that look a lot more like simple console applications.

The Graphics Magician lets you draw lines and shapes. You can change typefaces and sizes and position text in any color anywhere on the screen. You can open bitmap files and use them as backgrounds, and you can draw and move bitmap images around the screen. You can easily play WAV or MIDI files at any time. You can create programs that run in a window or that use the full screen.

Even more advanced, you can create sprites that have animation features built in. You can use a "back buffer" for smooth, fast, flicker-free animation. You can use collision-detection features, and even program "behaviors" for your sprites that tell them how they should move or act.

Here are some simple program examples:
    "Hello" program
     Typical console application running in the Graphics Machine
     But you can embellish your "console apps" with graphics
     Simple animation of a "bouncing ball", with sound
     Even better: smooth animation using a "back buffer"
There are many more examples in the documentation!

How to Get Started

It's all free. Just download Graphics Magician and start a "Graphics Magician Application" in Microsoft Visual C++ for Windows and you can write programs with color and graphics and sound right away. It works just fine with the free Visual C++ Express Edition that you can download from microsoft.com.

Click the Documentation and Download links at left to get started!

The original Graphics Magician

In the 1980's, I co-authored and published the original Graphics Magician for the Apple II computer. It was the easiest way to add graphics and animation to programs written in Applesoft Basic or 6502 Assembly language, and it become one of the best-selling software packages for many years, and was licensed by virtually every software publisher of the time who produced games and educational software.

What made it cool is that almost anyone could create programs with fancy graphics with just a few lines of BASIC. It was a great, fun way to learn programming.

That's pretty much ancient history now. The Smithsonian Museum of American History actually requested a copy for their archives. No kidding.

These days I teach computer programming in college. I wanted a way to get beyond the text-based programs of most CS1 courses, yet keep it simple enough for a first course in programming. So I adapted the philosophy of the old Graphics Magician, and created something of a similar nature that works with Microsoft Visual C++ and DirectX. No attempt was made to duplicate features of the original. Of course, back then we were limited to six colors and a speaker that could make a "clicking" sound, and an 8-bit processor that ran at 1Mhz. Times have changed, just a little....

Download Graphics Magician for free and start programming today!

Have fun,

- Mark Pelczarski
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