TECH: (-ish) Sound Change Applier programs

I'm trying to find the most useful SCA to help develop
my conlang (Unfortunately I don't have the knowhow to
write my own or edit someone else's).

Mark Rosenfelder's is very good in as far as it goes,
but I'm finding it a bit buggy when it comes to more
complicated environments. Also, variable names being
limited to a single character is also proving too
restrictive (not enough characters to cover all the
variables AND phonemes), as is the maximum .sc length
of 50 variables and 200 rules.

VSCA looked very promising (especially the exceptions
feature), but despite my PC having plenty of punch, it
just seems to hang if i run the program with more than
2 or 3 rules (I'm guessing too many variables /
exceptions are giving it a headache?)

I also had great hopes for Geoff's SCA - the
possibility of dialects is very useful, but this SCA
doesn't seem to want to work properly when it outputs
to a text file, although output to the monitor seems
to work fine (i.e. it seems to ignore rules when
outputting to file, but not when it ouputs to
screen!?) Unfortunately of course, I have BJP's
problem with screen output (it doesn't display any
characters beyond the most basic ASCII set) and of
course it can't be copied/saved to another location...

Does anyone have any recommendations as to other good
SCAs I may want to try that could work?  I have 4
prerequistes:
- It has to be able to run as a windows executable, or
from a windows command line (I have perl and python
installed, so i should be able to run programs written
in those languages from a command line).
- It has to read-in from and output to text files.
- It must allow variable names of reasonable length
(at least 3 or 4 characters long, and ideally n-long).
- Unicode support

I also have a 'wishlist' of features that i'd really
like the SCA to have, although I can work-around if
needs be
- the ability to make exemptions (before after env
except-if)
- alternates, i.e. x OR y - definitely in the env, and
ideally also in the before/after areas
-Metacharacters (* + ?, etc)
-mutiple dialects, as in Geoff's


Pete.

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