Alpha
Demos
Three of these are demoscene intros — the sort of thing that used to arrive on a floppy with a scroller and a chiptune. Two were written end to end by AI agents driving the running IDE through its automation tools; the six-part one was authored by a fan-out of agents and integrated live through the IDE the same way. All three were then compiled, unmodified, by the real VB6 compiler — the six-part one clean on the first attempt.
The other two are not intros. battleship is the reason to trust the first three: the same source, running identically on this interpreter and on the real 1998 compiler. bill-of-fare is the reason to distrust a green test suite — every part of it shipped broken at some point, and every one of those defects was found by a person opening the menu and looking.
Every one of them is plain VB6 source in the repository. The built executables are deliberately not committed: the tree-hygiene guard rejects a build artefact and CI enforces it, so each ships as source you rebuild rather than a binary you trust.
A six-part Amiga-style intro: raster plasma, copper bars, a 3D starfield, a glenz vector, vector balls and a sine-scroller — with real MIDI chiptune music underneath.
The plasma is computed per pixel into a 32-bit device-independent bitmap and blitted
with StretchBlt; the music goes out through midiOutShort.
Both of those are Windows API work, in VB6, written by an agent. It reflows when you
resize the window.
130 vector balls distributed over a sphere on a Fibonacci lattice, spun on two axes through a pair of rotation matrices, projected with perspective, depth-shaded from magenta to blue and painted back to front.
It is a painter's-algorithm sort and a lot of trigonometry, which is exactly what this sort of thing was in 1996.
“HEXIDE” on a per-character sine wave with the colours cycling through the spectrum. The smallest thing here — a form and a class, about a hundred lines together — and the best one to read first if you want to see what the interpreter handles.
Firing... (0,0) HIT (0,1) SUNK (5,5) MISS (2,0) HIT (2,1) HIT (2,2) SUNK AllSunk=False
Not an intro. An object-oriented Battleship engine — four classes, properties, an
object array holding the fleet, and WithEvents raising the hits — written
as ordinary VB6 with no graphics at all.
It exists to be run twice. The engine — those four classes, unchanged — runs on HexIDE's interpreter as a regression test, and inside a native executable built by the real 1998 compiler. That trace is what both of them produce, line for line. Only the driver around it differs: the archived project writes to a file, which needs file I/O the interpreter does not have, so the test harness prints to Debug instead.
That is the whole claim, and it is deliberately narrow. A tree-walking interpreter written in 2026 and a compiler shipped in 1998 agreeing exactly — on classes, events and object arrays — is the difference between “we implemented VB6” and “we checked”.
Also not an intro. A tour of the VB6 menu surface — a menu bar, submenus nested two deep, separators, shortcuts that fire from anywhere, access keys, a disabled item, and click dispatch to the event procedure. Bill of fare is the old term for a menu, which is the joke and the whole subject.
Every element in that one screenshot was broken at some point. The bar was empty; then the separators drew nothing; then a two-pixel dot; then near-black. Each of those shipped under a green test suite, and each was found by a person opening the menu and looking at it.
That is why it is archived rather than deleted. The assertions that passed throughout were true and useless — the item exists, the background is not null — and a picture of an open menu is the only artefact that would have caught any of it.
Read the source
Each lives in its own folder with the complete, self-contained VB6 source and a README
explaining how the effect works. If you have VB6 installed you can rebuild any of them
with VB6.EXE /make.