What is the coolest thing you've ever done with Visual Basic 6 or some other old language!

Question

I only ask since my younger brother who is undertaking a Computing A-level is learning to programme in Visual Basic 6. I think the school go for it because there is that visual element to keep the kids interested.

Well of course I sat down and helped him through the process of putting his peers to shame with crazily advanced programming concepts such as functions and variable types other than String!

But minutes passed and I became bored of these obvious constructs and decided to go to town and find out what VB6 can really do!

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A little while later we had an insane drawing application which reproduced a photoshop like brush effect scattering circles about the window and beeping at various intervals which gained in pitch. Then it was the next obvious step. Reproducing "Thriller" using only beeps, by ear, triggered when you drew something really special.

So I want to know what you rediscovered about an old language, what you created under similar comedic circumstances and has that influenced your thinking in any way?

P.S. I genuinely think that understanding how experienced programmers had or have fun with older languages is an interesting insight into how good (and bad) programmers think. I hope these answers will be useful to new and inspirational to old programmers alike.

Answer 1

(This was back when I was actively and exclusively using VB6 for who knows what, so not present-day. When I was around the age of 15-16.)

I unfortunately wrote a chat server and client that both supported a crappy plugin architecture, complements of the Implements keyword and what VB6 considers polymorphism. User account information was stored in an Access database.

It actually worked. No, really.

Incidentally, I just developed a headache.

Oh, and earlier than that (when I was probably 11-12) I wrote a program on my C64 to allow you to alter the keywords and error messages in the BASIC language by poking into the shadow copy of the BASIC ROM. I extrapolated a simple example in the C64 programming handbook where they changed one letter of one keyword, discovered the memory locations of all of the keywords and error messages, hardcoded them into the app, and allowed the user to not only input new keywords (if they were the same length) but save their selections to disk so they could restore their "personalized" version of the BASIC language later.

Answer 2

I've done a simple media player in VB6 six year ago.It was the best defenition of the spaghetti code since it was my first steps in programming :) and I've included every VB6 code I've found,somthing I understand and somthing I don't :D.
I also used VB6 to build a simple computer virus that restarts the computer when it is started and put it in the school's computers, the teacher was going to be crazy of this program so I volunteered to fix the problem and opend DOS to write some commands randomly :P and finally I removed my program pretending that the problem is fixed via special commands I've created.