one of the problems with being a mad scientist is that you can scope creep really fast
-
BTW with the "pop quiz" my current best solution is 13
@foone Surely one of those four-servo robot arms would do? (I think you could get it down to 3 and maintain the functionality though.) Add one for shift and you're fine, though possibly another for a different modifier key if necessary.
-
@foone Could you make Wine emulate dialog boxes close enough? And run in a browser?...
Hmm there's already stuff like BoxedWine, could you load the real Windows icons and fonts, and get the title bars close enough?@nyanpasu64 @foone why not? wine has a built in "desktop mode" for this purpose
-
@foone one and a very complex camshaft?
@Yuki oh that's a clever idea.
-
@Yuki oh that's a clever idea.
@foone hehe yay!
-
BTW with the "pop quiz" my current best solution is 13
@foone beam keystrokes to a PCjr with the infrared port on an HP 48SX calculator
-
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
@foone Mad Science means never stopping to ask "what's the worst thing that could happen?"
-
@onfy I am, but I'm also not anymore.
-
@foone beam keystrokes to a PCjr with the infrared port on an HP 48SX calculator
@gloriouscow sadly my PCjr can't run windows 95
-
@gloriouscow sadly my PCjr can't run windows 95
@foone skill issue
-
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 save a step: VBScript can MsgBox too, so you could use WScript to run a generated .vbs.
-
@gloriouscow sadly my PCjr can't run windows 95
@foone clearly the pcjr runs mtcp over parallel to the windows 95 machine
-
@gloriouscow sadly my PCjr can't run windows 95
@foone @gloriouscow they made a PCjr 286 upgrade, and there are 286->486 upgrades. So you could totally do this.
Don’t though. I did the 286->486 upgrade on a Sega TeraDrive owned by a friend and booted Windows 95 on it … it takes about 10 minutes to get to the desktop, in part because the XTIDE isn’t accelerated.
But, alas, after an hour of fucking with it at the Alum Rock library, I booted America’s favorite city simulator.
-
@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
-
@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.
-
@sif oh there's a lot of ways I could do this easier. I'm doing it wrong on purpose as part of the bit
-
@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 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
-
POP QUIZ: how many servos do you need, if you need to be able to type all the symbol keys on a QWERTY-US keyboard (49 keys), plus the following keys:
F5 (to run the program after we type in the code)
Enter (to close the popup after we take the photo, which will then trigger a shutdown)@foone Three. One to move the finger left and right, ne to move it up and down and one to press the key.
-
BTW with the "pop quiz" my current best solution is 13
@foone can you get it down to 6 by doing an xyz plotter for individual keystrokes plus 3 to cover control alt and shift? Bonus of you use an old RAMPS board without silent stepper drivers so it can sing at you as it types.
-
but it would make my mastodon and blusky posts at least 5% cooler
@foone I’m sure whoever’s running Intel this week would kill for a consistent 5% performance improvement with each CPU generation.
