I am looking for ways to interact with a console application, more specifically, an online game.

The first one, is merely trivial, a way to enter mouse clicks on a certain location. As a form of RSi protection everyone uses mouse clickers sometimes only I'd like to code my own to practice windows programming a bit and prepare for the second more difficult task.

That second task is to get the in game chat and log it. This functionality is NOT included for users and I think it is really a bad thing, sometimes it would be really nice to look back at the funnier exchanges. The chat comes in a specific window and it is colored letters on a black background. I could think of no better solution than storing that part of the screen as an image... on a keystroke... or just automatically. then it could be OCRed to real texts, or at least I hope it can

What I would like to know is basically just how to do the interaction with windows consoles, where to find the functions that interface with low level things like mouse control and screen output. Unfortunately i have little experience at programming in a windows environment, just unix. Perhaps the best thing would be a link to source code that does something related to these tasks?