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[lch]

Hi. This really looks awesome, Ballbarian.

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

It is being developed in VB6. I strongly considered Python, but Boa (for GUI development) felt very awkward after about 12 years of experience with VB. Since VB has been around so long, I would assume that most of it's features would be supported by crossover software like Wine.

I can only speak for myself, but Wine is awkward. I'm a supporter of Python-based GUIs myself, and I'm somebody who still constructs all those dialogues with a text editor instead of ever learning to use an IDE for that, but I can of course understand that a project as ambitious as this is a bit much for a new start in Python. Here's an idea how you might make it halfway towards the new technologies and learn something new in the process: Try to develop the program in C# or VB.Net with Visual Studio. Those are the new revamped versions of those programming languages and they're really a blast to develop because they have a lot of really cool features - I never ever did Basic but I've been programming a couple of tools in C# and it's really nice. And the Mono Project has been working to get Microsoft's DotNet family cross-platform compatible, too. So in case you have a .NET program, you should be able to get a Mono-compatible version out of it, which other people can use with Mono.

The difference between Wine and Mono, as far as I am understanding it, is this: Wine has to reproduce the Win32 API so that programs can run, and a lot of the internals from Microsoft are undocumented. The .NET platform consists of new programming languages (C#/VB.NET), a .NET runtime and a set of classes, and those are standarized. Programs written in those programming languages contain bytecode which is being interpreted, like Java bytecode is being interpreted through a Java virtual machine. (But since this really is only superficial knowledge, somebody who has more of an insight in the matter may correct me on all that I'm saying here)

In any case, big props to all the work you've done. I hope that you'll find some pointers so that even old dogs can learn new tricks, too.