Try HyperCard in a Web based Emulator for classic macOS

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Try HyperCard in a emulator ported to the web and running classic macOS with HyperCard installed on its hard drive image:
https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/tryhypercard/

This version uses 'web workers' and boots up the emulated Mac extremely fast in a modern web browser on a modern computer.

[richmond62]

Well I will try the thing out: although I do slightly wonder what the point of it is.

About 2 weeks ago I fired up my G3 iMac running to install authorware and realised that while in its time HC was something special, now it just looks shabby and seems to have nothing one can learn that is not contained in OXT.

This in no way is meant to run down the efforts of the person who got the emulation running: which is clever.

And I also got frustrated by Danny Goodman's "Hyper-Verbalism" in his book which I had open on a side-table.
I suppose 'then' things had to be explained more extensively and exhaustively than they do nowadays.

[richmond62]

This stack IS interesting (as far as it goes) insofar as I do NOT have that stack and have not seen it before:
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This looks like the start of GROUPS:
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[richmond62]

This is something that is NOT present in OXT (and might not be a bad idea to incorporate):
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Of course it could be extended to using either IMAGES or GRAPHICS as BUTTONS.

The VISUAL EFFECTS feature would stop a lot of people having to root around in the 'undergrowth' in that area.

[richmond62]

Code: Select all

copy miniature

might not be a bad idea for anyone wanting to make visual navigation buttons . . .

. . . the alternative involves taking snapshots of each card, shrinking them, and generally getting a bit hot and bothered.
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Whoops: Richmond is eating his words:

and seems to have nothing one can learn that is not contained in OXT

[richmond62]

https://github.com/PierreLorenzi/HyperCardPreview
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THIS is also quite Groovy:
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It would certainly be useful to have a way to collect half or quarter or 10% size images of cards for reference purposes.

[richmond62]

Yup: what HyperCard called family is obviously the same as what OXT calls a group.
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[tperry2x]

Code: Select all

copy miniature

might not be a bad idea for anyone wanting to make visual navigation buttons . . .
. . . the alternative involves taking snapshots of each card, shrinking them, and generally getting a bit hot and bothered.

While this is very easy to implement in OXT, I knew it would put up this warning in MacOS:

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Obviously, as soon as I export a snapshot of the card - because 'security'...
Anyway, made me laugh.
I chose 'Open System Preferences'. At this point, I've not actually granted access to it.

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You can see it's unchecked, implying that I've not allowed it yet - and yet, I have a snapshot

Anyway, you can see what could be a card navigator (in thumbnail form) in the top-right of that screenshot.
I could add that as a button on the "Card Navigator" - (view menu > card navigator) - so you can see a visual representation of cards as you mention Richmond, although it does start to look like powerpoint / google slides / "Libreoffice impress". Particularly if that popup window is placed on the left of the screen.

[tperry2x]

This is something that is NOT present in OXT (and might not be a bad idea to incorporate):


Of course it could be extended to using either IMAGES or GRAPHICS as BUTTONS.
The VISUAL EFFECTS feature would stop a lot of people having to root around in the 'undergrowth' in that area.

That would all be doable. I note that Hyperstudio also had a similar mode. (see the menubar I've clicked on the screenshot) - it also has a thumbnail overview of cards too, and it also has a stack navigator (like metacard).

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[richmond62]

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[OpenXTalkPaul]

Well I will try the thing out: although I do slightly wonder what the point of it is.

I think the main point of emulating hardware in a portable instruction set translating emulator software is to try to ensure that the software created for an instruction set can live on in perpetuity,

Because eventually your G3 might give out, and because not everyone has an old G3 iMac to fire up HyperCard to see if they think it was something special or not (it absolutely was and still is a unicorn), even if it's been transplanted outside of the context of the computing world of it's time, has no access to add on hardware like midi sound modules and whatnot, and may not even be a 100% accurate emulation of the original hardware that it does emulate.

HyperCard stacks could always look shabby (probably one of the reasons Steve Jobs axed it) OR they could look like excellent commercial software (at least for it's era), That very much depended on the stack author, skill and how much time was put into making a stack look good. Not all stacks need to look like commercial release quality software. I've made plenty of stacks just for my own experimenting that never ever intended to release to the public. For example my HC Home stack has a card with functions that reads binary file data with button to translates bits, bytes, ascii, hex, decimal, which was useful when learning about a binary file format such as RIFF, TIFF, AIFF, WAVE, etc.

Seems to have nothing one can learn that is not contained in OXT.

I guess that depends on what one is looking to learn.
Personally, I think what is really interesting to look at some of the clever techniques that some people used to push HC well beyond what most people thought HyperCard could do, and into areas people never thought it was capable of going. 'Tricks' such as using icon resources as sprites made HC into a very simple game engine that was capable of running smoothly on 0.8MHz clock speed CPU, and made it possible to build actually FUN games like Glider (which I believe that was proto-typed in HC) and of course famously the original Myst used HC as it's 'engine'.

There's syntax in OXT that is only in there due to a conscious effort to maintain some compatibility with its progenitors (HC, SC, MC, OMO). I think it helps to understand what those things were and what has gone missing from ours thing here over the years (like 'oval' style buttons or 'playSentence notation', or 'Answer Record' for a few examples) and which syntax was never truly supported (there's syntax that the engine recognizes but does not implement functionality for, such as the scriptTextSize property).

[richmond62]

Thanks for that historical contextualisation, which makes a lot of sense.

of course famously the original Myst used HC as it's 'engine'.

Yes, it did: and I have often thought it might be constructive to try a "MYST 2020+" with modern xTalk.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I was thinking it would be interesting to do videos of going through Danny Goodman's books but trying to do them in OXT (trying because some things would need to be modified).

[richmond62]

I was thinking it would be interesting to paraphrase sections from Danny Goodman's books (and I mean cut out a lot of verbage) in terms of OXT.

The problem is that Nobody would buy such a book.