Building Wadmerger with Visual Basic 6

The Wadmerger source code was released recently [link]. Wadmerger is a program used in Tomb Raider Level Editor (TRLE) building.

Wadmerger was written in Visual basic 6 which is an old language and this post shows how to get it working on Windows 10 using a Windows XP virtual machine.

Firstly create a Windows XP virtual machine (VM) using VirtualBox as described in the following article.

https://helpdeskgeek.com/virtualization/how-to-set-up-a-windows-xp-virtual-machine-for-free/

Windows XP will expire after 30 days in the virtual machine if not activated so make sure you create the snapshot as discussed in the article and also make a snapshot after you have installed Visual Basic 6 and all the other files you need.

In Settings>General>Advanced enable drag and drop as “Host to Guest” or “Bidirectional” so you can simply drag folders or files into the virtual machine to copy them.

Copy the extracted WadToolsSource folder to the virtual machine.

Download Visual Basic 6 from the following link.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-visual-bas/60



I downloaded the first link and extracted the files. (You will need to use 7zip [link].)

With the Windows XP virtual machine running go to Devices>Optical Drives>Choose a disk file and select the Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition.ISO file to “insert” the installation CD into the virtual machine.

Install Visual Basic 6.0 into the Windows XP virtual machine. A serial key is included in the download but I think using all ones (1) works too.

Download the Visual Basic 6 Service Pack and install into the virtual machine by copying the exe to the virtual machine and executing it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5721

Visual Basic 6 doesn’t support scrolling with the mouse wheel so search the internet for “VB6 scroll wheel fix” or similar and install into the virtual machine.

I used the one from here [link] but it needs to executed every time you run Visual Basic 6.

Wadmerger needs a type library that is not included in the installation but it can be found included with the following source code example.

https://www.planet-source-code.com/upload_PSC/ftp/OpenGL%20Col197085172001.zip

Extract the file “vbogl.tlb” and copy it to the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder in the virtual machine.

Also copy the file “zlib.dll” found in your normal Wadmerger folder to the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder in the virtual machine.

Finally copy some TRLE wad files and TR level files to the virtual machine so you can use them to test or study Wadmerger.

You will find the Wadmerger source code in the WADToolsSource\WADmerger folder. Open the WADmerger.vbp project and open the form TRWadEdit2 as a starting point to study the code.

Note that when you build Wadmerger the executable is created in the WADToolsSource\Bin\WADmerger folder.

Delete the file WADToolsSource\Bin\WADmerger\WADmerger.ini before first running WADmerger in Visual Basic otherwise you get an error.

Now debug Wadmerger and fix all those bugs!

Make sure to copy your changes to the code back to the host so they are not lost if you restore a snapshot.



If you want to build TurboPascal’s Delphi programs you could also install Delphi 7 from here, https://winworldpc.com/product/delphi/70.

If you want to build Popov’s TRViewer 1.083 you should search for Visual Studio.net 2003 and install Visual C++ into the virtual machine.

Remember to create a snapshot of the virtual machine after you install anything.

Good luck.