Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️one of the problems with being a mad scientist is that you can scope creep really fast
I haven't written line one of code on this project and I'm already thinking about how much dedicated hardware powered on and monitored I'd have to have to support indefinitely
but it would make my mastodon and blusky posts at least 5% cooler
so I recently did a lets-call-it-a-poem about (specifically Windows) computers loving us back:
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276073266480193
and I was thinking I want a way to do this automatically, specifically I'd like (almost) the first one.
and this post describes the behind-the-scenes of how I made these. (tl;dr it was manual screenshots)
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276567994297740
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276567994297740
and I was thinking about automating it so I could do another thing: make a mastodon instance that renders every post on it as pixel-accurate windows 95 dialog boxes
and the OBVIOUS answer for "how do I do that" is "extend the death generator to do windows 95 dialog boxes and then automate it".
I've done the second half before, automated the death generator. It's a pain and is ugly (the death generator is written exactly wrong to make this doable) but I've done it before, I can steal Foone's code for it
but "I've done it before" is kinda boring and also windows dialog boxes have a surprising number of edge cases that I am unable to escape being autistically perfectionist about.
so adding win95 to the death generator, while it would be cool, is probably not happening any time soon
but I'm a Mad Scientist.
So what's the Mad Scientist way to do this? Well, how'd I do it before?
I wrote a line of code in my Visual Basic 6 IDE and ran it on my Windows 98 VM
So let's just automate that.
We take the post text, generate a visual basic source file for it, then boot windows 98, compile the visual basic, run the EXE, take a screenshot, shutdown
"easy", for certain values of "easy"
But where do we run the code?
Well there's two obvious options that are sufficiently Mad Scientist enough to be interesting enough to do:
1. In the browser. Do this client-side. Boot a VM in the browser that runs Visual Basic and then the resulting EXE and shows that to the user
Ziggy the Hamster ☎️ 4ZTH@foone save a step: VBScript can MsgBox too, so you could use WScript to run a generated .vbs.
@ZiggyTheHamster nah using Visual Basic is a loadbearing part of my Mad Science
@foone in that case, you can pass switches to the VB6 executable to make it compile a project, so you could generate the .bas/.frm and compile it with a .bat, and finally run it.
I did some version of this when I developed and maintained an IRCX server written in VB6.
@ZiggyTheHamster the problem is that I still need to get the data into the computer, and "typing it into VB6 IDE" is that step in the current design.
I guess I could write a wrapper program that just types in the input+an enter, then runs the VB6 compile + run, but by that point why don't I just make the program call MessageBoxA?
so having VB6 be part of the loop is important to me
@ZiggyTheHamster oh I was thinking about the hardware option, I didn't see this was on the "in the browser" option.
yeah that'd help, that'd be what I'd want to do