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 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

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

@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