Drawing the Flags / Easter Egg
In the first version of Nautical Flags, I used the Visual Basic graphic commands Line and Circle to draw each of the individual flags. This worked fine on computers running Windows 95, but under Windows NT it executed so slowly that you literally could watch each line on the flags being drawn!

To solve this problem, I rewrote the flag display subroutine to use Windows API graphics functions in place of the Visual Basic graphic commands. I was able to draw all the flags with just three primitives: Ellipse for circles, Polygon for triangles, trapezoids, and diagonal stripes, and Rectangle for rectangular areas. Nautical Flags now runs equally fast on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.