a TON of source code and projects archived from PlanetSourceCode.com

[madscijr]

I think we all have different strengths and interests. If you are into stuff like ReactOS and Linux and C, that's great. That ain't my wheelhouse, not even close! QB64 is closer to VB6 than the stuff you're into, at least for me. I loved VB6, and love VBA, and find C, C++ and .NET painful. You are way more advanced than I will ever be, hats off to you!

Sometimes you read my posts too closely. I was jiving a bit.

Ah! Well you know how touchy we get over our tools and programming langauges! If you insult someone's platform, it can be like insulting their mother! LOL

But I don't understand why you want to run VB6, when it was put down for a reason.

It was put down for a few reasons, but maybe not good reasons for people who were productive with and enjoyed VB6:

• Licenses!!! Microsoft's business model means they have to continually sell new software, so they deprecate the old.
  
• Managed code and 100% object-oriented seen as better for enterprise development. OO is not perfect, for many jobs it is more complicated, and has overhead.
  
• Microsoft can't support everything, they update their tools and people go along with it to get support and be current / compatible. 
  
• Valid improvements to the language = doesn't mean the old language is "broken", people like modern features but also, they need something new to sell, so new features = new product = more revenue for Microsoft. But if "newer is better" is a reason to retire classic VB, then why are we here playing with QuickBasic? Sometimes the old way works fine and is better for certain people.
  

Not necessarily for something better for many of us.

You got that right, lol. I did VB.NET with framework 1.1, and it was okay. But all my code and learning how to do things in VB6 (and before that QuickBasic) no longer worked. Lots of time and energy spent to redo everything that worked fine before, and then spend $ to buy new tools, etc. 

VB.NET 1.1 still let you do some procedural code, but with each version they moved to pure OO, and the language changed and didn't always stay backwards-compatible. More work! Also, MS started leaving features out of VB.NET that were in C#, and things that used to be done for you in VB you now had to do manually. I don't recall specific examples, I remember thinking "really??? this used to be so easy!"

But I don't understand why you want to run VB6

Also, let me clarify that when I say VB6, I am talking about 2 different things - the language and the IDE.

VB langauge
The language is not the newest with the most advanced features (then again neither is QuickBasic!)
But the language worked. Things I like about the VB6 (and VBA) language:

• Easy! If you know it, you don't have to learn a ton of new stuff. It doesn't change every year like .NET, and old code still works.
  
• Tons of existing documentation still online for VB6.
  
• You can do OO but don't have to, you can stick with procedural code if you want. Options!
  
• The language itself is just an easy syntax and it works. Same reason we have and like QB64!
  
• In VB6 you can reference OO COM DLLs from other Windows applications, and use them in your own code. QB64 doesn't have OO so you need an OO langauge to use those features.
  

VB IDE
The IDE is just the tool to build your applications. Things I liked about the VB6 IDE:

• Easy to set up - you just install it and it works. You can configure it, but you don't have to, it works right out of the box.
  
• Built in form builder. Drag and drop basic GUI elements onto the screen. Drag the elements and screen to resize them. Double-click an element to edit its codebehind. All WYSIWYG.
  
• Simple to use. Not perfect, but good enough, and easy. Same as QB64's IDE - not perfect, but it works and is good enough. If QB64's IDE is good enough, so is VB6's.
  
• Compiles to a native EXE (not intermediate language!)
  

There were things I don't like about VB6:

• The GUI design is saved as binary data - it would be better if it was in some human-readable format that can be edited in notepad if you want (similar to HTML forms, etc.)
  
• No option to compile to a single standalone EXE file (where DLLs and other dependencies are rolled into the EXE).
  
• Probably missing a bunch of features that IDEs got in the 20+ years since VB6 (although sometimes too many features make things too complicated!)
  

But if you want to use it again only to run a couple of programs, and very desperate to run that sine-wave/square-wave oscillator demo, which does only one thing, cannot play MIDI, cannot record what it produces, cannot do anything else with the sound etc...

Not just a couple of programs! Hundreds! Thousands!
I have hundreds of my own VB6 programs and libraries, thousands of lines of code, and thousands of other applications that do many many different things.

I'm not into C as deeply as you might think. I used to be, in the 1990's because I decided to waste time that way. Did nothing very useful except replicate somebody else's windows for application programming in text mode, ie. looking like M$QB editor. I wanted to go much further than I did with Turbo Pascal v5.5. By the time I discovered QB64 I rarely did anything in C or C++. However I was put off so much by the bugginess of the SDL versions of QB64 that I kept using M$QB45 because I was allowed to do so on a laptop running Windows7. At the time, I did a lot of stuff just processing text files. Nothing with music and images. If it had to do with music it was fabricating a REAPER project file, creating an XML file (combined with ZIP-creation utility) toward some other music application so it could load instruments, samples and sound effect definitions and that sort of thing. Eventually that computer's HDD crashed and I was forced to use Ubuntu Studio 32-bit which left me only with Lua. No problem, I was still able to do that XML thing for a while longer. Didn't care about speed of doing things until I got fancy and got to loading, fabricating and saving one-channel wave files, discovering how fantastic Lua's tables are. Never needed C or C++ for any of that stuff. I programmed in Purebasic for about a year and the only thing it was able to do better than QB64 in my opinion was looking like other Windows applications with the GUI's, menus, dialog boxes, mouse handling etc. Doing stuff with images and music, well, it was a matter of time before QB64 grew functions that satisfied me enough instead of complicating my life further.

Interesting story! You have experience with many different languages. 
I liked Pascal back in school, it was a little wordy, but easier to work with than C, and compiled to fast machine code. 
I haven't tried PureBasic, any good? 
So let me ask you, if you like QB 4.5, what do you have against VB6? 
Because if you are into new features and "modern" programming, QuickBasic is even less advanced than classic VB! 
Why one and not the other? There is no right or wrong answer, I am just curious.

As usual TL;DR. Pass me the orange juice, I don't drink alcoholic beverages. :tu:

Ha! Cheers!