SolidCraft 98

INTRODUCING SOLIDCRAFT 98 PROFESSIONAL EDITION. Parametric solid modelling comes to the desktop PC! Sketch it, extrude it, drill it, and change your mind afterwards: every feature is fully editable, and everything built on it follows. A true 32-bit Windows application with a genuine Multiple Document Interface, a 16-colour toolbar, real-time* wireframe graphics, photorealistic** shading, Export for Rapid Prototyping and a Turbo button. Runs in 16 MB of RAM***. Fits on one floppy disk****.

_{* about 12 frames a second. ** flat. *** tested: 9.4 MB, see Where it runs. **** packed with UPX, which came out in 1998, so it counts.}

Watch it: from an empty desktop to a 3D-printable part, on ReactOS (3:43, YouTube, turn on captions)

Talk about it: discuss SolidCraft 98 on the Dutchman CAD Discord, in #solidcraft98-updates and #solidcraft98-chat.

Let a model drive it: Dutchman Pilot helps small local AI models use SolidCraft 98's remote control, from Pilot 0.1.0-beta.3 on.

SolidCraft 98 is a parametric CAD program written the way it would have been written in 1999: in Visual Basic, with an MDI window, a TreeView, a ListView in Report mode, and a wireframe viewport drawn with Line, one edge at a time. The shaded view fills in every pixel itself.

It's a joke, but it works. You can sketch, extrude, revolve, drill holes, put features on top of other features, change any of them later, open designs from SolidCraft itself, save the part to a file nobody else can read, and export it as an STL file that any 3D-printing slicer can.

SolidCraft 98 is a parody. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a replacement for SolidCraft, and it shares no code with it.

_{On ReactOS with the Classic theme, at 800 x 600: a design made in SolidCraft, rebuilt and shaded in SolidCraft 98. The fillet is waiting for SolidCraft 2000.}

Getting it

Download SolidCraft98-<version>.zip (the newest is 1.2) from the Releases page, check its SHA-256 against the one listed there if you like, unzip it anywhere, and run SolidCraft98.exe. There's no installer and nothing to register: one EXE, which is very un-1999 of it. It runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on ReactOS. The EXE isn't signed, so Windows may say it "protected your PC": choose More info, then Run anyway.

Or on a floppy, as was intended: each release also has a 1.44 MB disk image (SolidCraft98-<version>-floppy.img) with the EXE packed by UPX to about 530 KB, so it all fits on one disk. Write it to a disk (or attach it to a virtual machine) and run A:\SC98.EXE.

Other editions

The same program, the same features and the same .sc98 files, byte for byte, in two more languages from the period (or near enough). Both are on the Releases page next to the Windows version. The remote control is in the Linux and Pi one too, but not yet in the Delphi Edition.

Edition	Runs on	Written in	Download
Delphi Edition	Windows, ReactOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi	Object Pascal (Free Pascal and Lazarus)	SolidCraft98-Delphi-1.2.zip
Linux and Raspberry Pi	Linux, and a Raspberry Pi from 2014 (ARMv6)	FreeBASIC, every pixel drawn by hand	SolidCraft98-Linux-1.2.tar.gz

The book

SolidCraft 98: The Definitive Guide is the short, picture-heavy manual that would have come in the box: a tour of the screen, your first part from start to finish, the Turbo button, and a few hints. It's also a web page, docs/manual/index.html, to open in any browser.

What it can't do yet

• Sketches are rectangles and circles, flat, facing up. Revolve turns them about the Y axis. Holes go straight down from a top face.
• No booleans to speak of. In an STL, a body standing wholly on another's top face is joined to it; bodies that meet any other way stay separate (slicers merge them).
• Export is STL only. Parts save as .sc98, which nothing else reads.

What's in it

• A grey MDI main window with a menu bar, a toolbar of hand-drawn 16-colour icons, and a status bar.
• Each part opens in its own child window, which you can minimise inside the app by accident.
• A feature tree on the left and a timeline along the bottom.
• A viewport, wireframe or shaded. It starts isometric, looking at the front, right and top. Drag with the left button to orbit and the right button to pan; + and - zoom. S shades it, slowly.
• Commands: Sketch Rectangle (with rounded corners), Sketch Circle, Extrude, Revolve, and Hole. Plus Undo, Zoom to Fit and Regenerate.
• It's parametric. Double-click any feature to change its numbers, and whatever is built on it follows. Del deletes a feature (and, after asking, anything built on it).
• Sketches sit on the ground or on top of an extrude, and move with it.
• Holes go into the top of any extrude. "Through all" goes through everything stacked underneath.
• File > Export for Rapid Prototyping writes a binary STL, closed and facing out, for a 3D printer or a service bureau.
• Save and Open use Put and Get on a single Type. Open a file from a newer version and you're told so. Files from versions 3 and 4 are converted.
• Number boxes go through CDbl with no validation, so typing 20mm gets you a genuine Run-time error '13': Type mismatch. It's caught and shown, not a crash.
• An About box and a splash screen, both drawn in code.

Design your first part

A mounting plate: 80 x 50 x 6 mm with rounded corners, a hole in each corner, and a boss in the middle with a bore through it and the plate. About five minutes. (It's in samples/Mounting Plate.sc98 if you'd rather look.)

1. The plate outline. Press R (Sketch, Rectangle). Width 80, Height 50, Corner X -40, Corner Y -25, Corner radius 6. Leave "On feature #" at 0, which means the ground. OK.
2. The plate. Press E (Extrude). Depth 6. OK.
3. Corner holes. Press H (Hole). Diameter 5, Depth 0 (all the way through), Centre X -32, Centre Y -17. OK. Do it three more times at (32, -17), (32, 17) and (-32, 17).
4. The boss outline. Press C (Sketch, Circle). Radius 10, Centre 0, 0. "On feature #": 2, which is the plate's number in the # column of the timeline. Height above that: 0. OK.
5. The boss. Press E. Depth 15. OK.
6. The bore. Press H. Diameter 10, Depth 0, Centre 0, 0. It goes on the boss, the last extrude, and because it's "through all" it carries on through the plate as well. OK.
7. Change your mind. Double-click Extrude1 in the timeline and make it 8 mm. The boss moves up with the plate, and the bore still goes all the way through.
8. Save. Ctrl+S.
9. Shade it. Press S, and watch it render a few rows at a time.
10. Print it. File > Export for Rapid Prototyping (*.stl). Open the STL in any slicer (PrusaSlicer, Cura, OrcaSlicer...) and print it.

Tips:

• Drag in the view with the left button to orbit, the right button to pan. I puts it back to isometric; F fits it to the window.
• A hole goes on the extrude you've selected in the tree or the timeline, or on the last one if nothing is selected. A new sketch sits on the selected extrude too.
• Number boxes do arithmetic: 80/2, 25+3.5. They don't do units, and they'll tell you so.

Shaded, and Export for Rapid Prototyping

View > Shaded (S, or the cube on the toolbar) draws the part as solid surfaces. It's a software renderer, as was the custom: every triangle is filled in pixel by pixel with a depth for each pixel, so near things hide far things properly, and lines go where faces meet at a corner. Then the picture goes up a few rows at a time, top to bottom. It takes about a second and a half, on purpose. While you orbit, the view is wireframe; it shades again when you let go.

File > Export for Rapid Prototyping (*.stl) writes the part for a 3D printer: a binary STL in millimetres, closed, every triangle facing out, holes cut all the way through, and the part moved into the all-positive corner of space as the 1989 format asked. A boss standing on a plate is joined to it, so the two come out as one solid. Circles become 64-sided. The samples open in PrusaSlicer as manifold and slice without repairs.

Opening SolidCraft designs

File > Open also takes a design from SolidCraft itself (.solidcraft, or a plain-JSON design). SolidCraft 98 reads the design's feature history and rebuilds what it can:

In SolidCraft	In SolidCraft 98
A sketch on the XY plane, or on a flat face that points up, of rectangles (plain or rounded) and circles	Sketches; one on a face sits on the extrude under it
Extrude, new or join, in either direction or symmetric	Extrude
Circles inside an extruded outline	Holes through that extrude
A cut extrude of circles into a top face	Holes
A simple or drilled hole, straight down	Hole
Revolve about the sketch's Y axis	Revolve

Anything else (fillets, chamfers, patterns, sketches on side planes...) stays in the timeline with the status "Requires SolidCraft 2000", and the part opens with what's left. A feature comes over whole or not at all: if part of it can't be rebuilt exactly, all of it waits for SolidCraft 2000.

The design is read, not changed. Save writes a new .sc98. Try the three .solidcraft files in samples/.

Turbo

The toolbar has a Turbo button, with an LED next to it. It doesn't do what you'd hope.

Turbo, and the other things in here (spoilers)

Like the button on the front of a 1990s PC, except backwards. The LED next to it reads 66 MHz normally and 33 MHz with Turbo on, and Turbo switches on the authentic 1999 behaviour. With Turbo off, everything just works.

With Turbo on:

• Regenerate (F5) says "Did not converge. Try again." twice, then succeeds on the third press. The solver uses a Variant.
• Orbit is capped at 4 frames a second, and the status bar says so.
• Shaded takes four seconds instead of one and a half: Turbo quality. Every pixel is rendered twice, to be sure.
• "20mm" in a number box escalates: Type mismatch, then Still a type mismatch, then "It's a TextBox, not a mind reader", then a tip about Val(). On the fifth try it gives up and takes 20.
• Cal's "Don't show me this tip again" pins the tip in the corner instead, so you won't miss it. Its x does close it.
• Dividing by zero in a number box (they take arithmetic, so 40/0) gets a full-screen blue fatal exception. Press any key; the part is fine. With Turbo off it's a plain run-time error 11.
• File > Send To 3 1/2 Floppy (A:) saves the part to the hard disk, then "copies" it to three floppies, asking for each disk. Turbo saves include an uncompressed preview bitmap, for speed.
• Y2K: on 31 December 1999 by the PC's clock, at midnight, every dimension becomes 19100 mm. Start with SolidCraft98.exe /Y2KTEST to see it a minute after launch without touching the clock.
• DLL Hell: Help > About, Shift-click the logo. A setup program copies MSCOMCTL.OCX over itself to 112% and asks you to restart Windows.

Either way:

• Cal, the caliper assistant, notices when you sketch a rectangle.
• Type WIN98 in the About box for the demo-scene credits.
• The Konami code in the viewport (up up down down left right left right B A) spins the part at full speed for three seconds: "60 fps (lying)".
• File > Publish to Web writes a home page for the part: a marquee, a hit counter, an animated "under construction" GIF and a picture of the part.

Every one of these is only drawn on screen. Nothing touches system files, the clock or a disk drive, and no design is ever lost.

Keys

Key	Command
Ctrl+N / Ctrl+O / Ctrl+S	New, Open, Save
Ctrl+Z	Undo last feature
R, C	Sketch rectangle, sketch circle
E, V, H	Extrude, Revolve, Hole
I, F	Isometric view, Zoom to fit
S	Shaded (again for wireframe)
Enter, or double-click	Edit the selected feature
Del	Delete the selected feature
+ / -	Zoom in and out
F5	Regenerate
F1	Help (it isn't installed)

Everything is a command

In 1999 the Extrude logic would have lived in cmdExtrude_Click, been copy-pasted into mnuExtrude_Click and again into Form_KeyDown, and the three copies would have drifted apart by the second release.

Here the joke stays in this paragraph. The toolbar, the menus and the keyboard all call RunCommand "Extrude" in modCommands.bas, and there is one copy of each command.

Remote control

Start it with /REMOTE and SolidCraft 98 listens on TCP port 9898, the way remote-administration tools of the day did. Telnet in and type one command per line. It answers in plain text, reading the screen out the way a screen reader does, and ends each answer with a line holding only a ..

look                    what's on the screen
click <name>            a button, menu, field, toolbar button or feature
doubleclick <name>      a feature in the timeline: edit it
rightclick <name>
menu <Menu> > <Item>    e.g. menu Features > Extrude...
key <keys>              e.g. key enter, key tab, key ctrl+s
type <text>
drag <x1> <y1> <x2> <y2>
wait <ms>
how <words>             look it up in the help index, e.g. how hole
yes                     take the step it just offered
help, quit

Clicks and keys go in as real mouse and keyboard input, so anyone watching sees the pointer glide over and the letters appear. Every read-out ends with a Tutor: line saying what to do next, mistakes get "Did you mean ...?", and how and the tutor offer a step that yes takes.

Plain /REMOTE takes connections from this PC only. /REMOTE:ANY takes them from any computer, for driving it in a virtual machine from the host. Whoever connects works your real mouse and keyboard, so use it only on a network you trust. /REMOTE:port and /REMOTE:port:ANY pick another port. The Linux and Pi edition takes the same commands on standard input with sc98 --remote.

Dutchman Pilot drives SolidCraft 98 through it, so small local AI models can use the program: get Pilot 0.1.0-beta.3 or later, and start SolidCraft 98 with /REMOTE:ANY if Pilot runs on another computer or on the host of a virtual machine. Pilot's SolidCraft 98 guide has the rest.

Source

The source is plain VB6 text: src/SolidCraft98.vbp plus .frm and .bas files. There are no .frx files: the icons, the logo and the splash are drawn at startup.

File	What it does
frmMain.frm	MDI frame: menus, toolbar, status bar
frmPart.frm	A part window: tree, viewport, timeline
frmParams.frm	The one dialog every command uses for its numbers
frmAbout.frm, frmSplash.frm	About box and splash
modCommands.bas	Every command, once
modModel.bas	The design Type, the feature list, Save and Open
modKernel.bas	Turns features into edges (the "geometry kernel")
modView.bas	Projection, orbit, wireframe drawing
modMesh.bas	Turns the part into closed triangle meshes
modShade.bas	The shaded view: a software renderer
modStl.bas	Export for Rapid Prototyping (binary STL)
modBars.bas	The toolbar and status bar, drawn in PictureBoxes
modIcons.bas	Toolbar icons as 16x16 text pixel art
modImport.bas	Opening SolidCraft designs
modZip.bas, modJson.bas	A ZIP reader with its own Deflate decoder, and a JSON parser
modClassic.bas	Keeps the classic look on modern Windows; coloured text
modTurbo.bas	The Turbo button and the 1999 behaviour behind it
modExpr.bas	Arithmetic in number boxes
modGif.bas, modPublish.bas	GIF writer and Publish to Web
modRemote.bas, modTutor.bas	Remote control, and its help index and tutor
frmFloppy, frmFatal, frmSetup, frmCal, frmCalPin, frmCredits	The easter eggs

The toolbar and status bar are drawn by hand rather than taken from MSCOMCTL.OCX, because that OCX doesn't ship with current Windows. The TreeView and ListView are the MSCOMCTL ones as far as VB6 is concerned.

Building from source

The source is the VB6 project, src/SolidCraft98.vbp. Two ways to build it:

With twinBASIC (free, and what the release is built with):

1. Install twinBASIC on Windows, and Python 3 on any machine.

2. Convert the VB6 project to a twinBASIC source folder, and pack it:

   python3 tools/vb2tb.py src/SolidCraft98.vbp build/src
   python3 tools/impexp.py import build/SolidCraft98.twinproj build/src --overwrite
   

3. Build it, 32-bit:

   twinBASIC.exe build\SolidCraft98.twinproj --buildAndExit32
   

   The EXE lands in build\Build\SolidCraft98.exe, with the manifest and the icon built in. If the build hits a compile error the IDE stays open in the background: open the .twinproj in the IDE to see the errors.

vb2tb.py does what twinBASIC's own VBP import does, without the IDE: it turns each .frm into twinBASIC's form format, converts twips to pixels, maps the MSCOMCTL TreeView and ListView onto twinBASIC's built-in common controls, and embeds the manifest and the icon. impexp.py is twinBASIC's own MIT-licensed import/export tool.

On GitHub, every push builds on a Windows runner (.github/workflows/build.yml, which runs tools/ci/build.ps1): twinBASIC's first-run questions are answered in advance, the build has a time limit, and it fails if the UPX-packed EXE no longer fits on a 1.44 MB floppy. A v* tag publishes the zip and the floppy image as a release.

With Visual Basic 6, if you have it: open src/SolidCraft98.vbp, File > Make SolidCraft98.exe, and put SolidCraft98.exe.manifest next to the EXE. (Untested: VB6 isn't something you can download any more.)

Where it runs

Windows 11, where it was built and tested, and ReactOS 0.4.16, the free NT-compatible operating system. On ReactOS, with the Classic theme at 800x600, it looks the way it was always meant to: grey 3D chrome and blue gradient title bars. The same .sc98 files open on both. On a screen too small for the window it starts maximised.

SolidCraft98.exe uses about 9.4 MB of RAM, with a part open and shaded. The 1 GB in its About box is the PC's memory, reported the 1998 way.

Tools

Tool	What it does
tools/vb2tb.py	VB6 project to twinBASIC source folder
tools/impexp.py	twinBASIC's project packer (MIT, unchanged)
tools/pixpng.py	Renders the icons in modIcons.bas to a PNG
tools/mkico.py	Makes SolidCraft98.ico from the "App" icon

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE. The EXE is compiled with twinBASIC, which is not part of this project.

SolidCraft 98 is a parody, and not affiliated with or a replacement for SolidCraft.