VC6x64Fix Alternatives

VC6x64Fix reviews and mentions

• John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Aug 2022

  Installing VS6 on modern Win10 can be annoying. Might actually be easier to make a dedicated Wine prefix on Linux :-P.

  Anyway, there is an article written on CodeProject[0] a few years ago about installing VS6. It may also work on Win11, however due to the changes over time you need to do some more additional stuff:

  1. Do not install the OLE/COM viewer

  2. Ensure the installation finished propertly otherwise SP6 wont install

  4. Install SP2 CD if you have it (it was part of my own VS6 box)

  5. If setupsp6.exe wont run, copy sp698ent.stf to acmsetup.stf and run acmsetup.exe instad

  6. Install tlloc fix from [1], otherwise the debugger wont be able to terminate finished applications

  After all that Visual C++ 6 should work fine. For VB6 you may want to run it in Win9x compatibility mode, otherwise you'd get some slow drawing in the form editor. But something like Lazarus[2] would be better if you want to throw together some GUI app, it isn't like there is any special integration between VC6 and VB6 (something that i always found weird - ideally VB6 should have been able to use VC6 headers or even C sources directly just by making them part of the project, kinda like how you could mix Delphi and C++ in later versions of Delphi and C++ Builder, but for some reason Microsoft treated VS6 and VB6 as if they were each being made by a different company and only coincidentally happened to be on the same CD).

  Though honestly if you have enough RAM, VS6 isn't really that much faster compared to modern Visual Studio. From that time period something like C++ Builder 1 is way faster.

  [0] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-...

  [1] https://github.com/pinchyCZN/VC6x64Fix

  [2] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/