Richmond's Next Cretinous Project

[richmond62]

Indeed, and quite possibly, but notwithstanding, possibly informative.

1. Hack LC 7.1.4 [this has the full Unicode implementation].

2. 7.1.4 consists of STACKS only.

3. Paul [?] informed me that it IS possible to get 7.1.4 running on the likes of MacOSes 11,12,13 & so on (we hope) . . .

[lost that; please can you post again]

This is to produce a tool for teachers to spin off, as the tarty types term it "Programs for Enhancement and Reinforcement" ...

or, as Richmond, a slightly cruder fellow puts thing: "Programs to hold the attention of the current ADS generation of children for more than 3 minutes."

[tperry2x]

I wonder what bug fixes there were between LC7 to LC9? Probably quite a few I'd imagine, so if possible they'd need to be carried forward into whatever you propose creating.
I have LC7 (runrev) working on a 64-bit only OSX 10.9 imac. It wasn't open-source though I believe. Not sure at what version Livecode came out with the community version. Perhaps someone with more time can add that?

[richmond62]

The first Open Source version of LC was numbered 6.0.1

[richmond62]

I wonder what bug fixes there were between LC7 to LC9?

Well, the trick would be to implement the bug-fixes, but NOT the new features such as widgets [which I personally dislike].

AND, as my goal is a tool to teach general computer programming principles, those widgets are not required at all.

[tperry2x]

...NOT the new features such as widgets [which I personally dislike]... those widgets are not required at all.

Funnily enough, that's the first section of the tools palette that I hide straight away when installing LC / OXT. That, and I always go back to a 2-column layout.
Looking through the Community version, they have helpfully mentioned [bug fix] here and there, so hopefully would be possible to carry some improvements forward without unnecessary bloat. The problem though of using an older build of LC was that you also get an older engine with the standalones you create, so previous vulnerabilities are carried forward along with annoyances and performance issues such as memory leaks. I say this as I've noticed from poking around in the 'lite' hack, that there were a few hints in the code to memory leaks that LC had patched in the engine. These won't carry forward without the engine being recompiled with these fixes in place.
Might just be best to reuse the older versions 'as is', due to the engine changes - as patching something in the IDE that isn't supported by the older engine could lead to all manner of extra headaches.

[tperry2x]

Funny what you find while poking around inside Livecode:

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The lines:
"We are an Open Source Company"
and
"Contribute from as little as $1" - that escalated quickly

Also, what was Dreamcard? (also found buried inside LC)

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[richmond62]

I am sure someone 'here' [Master Paul?] mentioned a way to get 7.1.4 running on the latest macOS by swapping a component, but now I cannot find that post . . .

[richmond62]

Odd as it may seem, I actually owned Dreamcard for Mac.

As it did NOT allow one to build standalones [and was later succeeded by the similar RevMedia (which was free)], it was effectively a dead duck.

A fairly coarse colleague of mine remarked how DC and RevMedia were a bit like jumping into bed with a chap who had a vasectomy.

[richmond62]

Aaaaaaah: GOTTIT:

Anyway I wanted to mention that you can actually get LCC v7 (not 6) to work on newer macOS versions IF you replace the apps binaries with the 64bit cable binaries from LCC v8. For everything to work a the External that the IDE uses must be moved over as well (the revDatabase external in particular).

Mind you, you did not reply to my question as to what a 'cable binary' might be.

Previous experiments with cables has not always proven positive:
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Anyway, I will assume what is meant are the files inwith the /Contents/MacOS/ folder . . .

on my way to attempt to create a hybrid monster.
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Let's hope mine looks less botched-up than that thing does.

[richmond62]

Nope: MacOS 12 'Monterey' did NOT like that one little bit:
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Only 'Cheese':
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Rich in Calcium, but NOT rich in what it takes to run on MacOS 12.

'Bits' pinched from LC 8.0.0 . . .

Which RUNS on MacOS 12.

Is your information, Paul, based on:

1. Experience?

2. Rumour/Rumor?

3. Something else?

I would be extremely grateful if you could give me a full explanation.

[richmond62]

Wednesday is my 'Free' day: meaning no teaching in my school, meaning 4-5 hours for daft projects like this:
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Now, with EXTRA cheese.

[richmond62]

So: let's try the same exercise all over again, but with the pList from LC 8.0.0:

Jambalay-Cod-Fish Pie:
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[richmond62]

Of course this sort of exercise is not necessary with Linux . . .

. . . certainly Debian and Debian derivatives (such as Ubuntu) will run things at least as far back as RunRev 4.0 with no 'fiddling around' at all.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

3. Paul [?] informed me that it IS possible to get 7.1.4 running on the likes of MacOSes 11,12,13 & so on (we hope) . . .

[lost that; please can you post again]

Well I've only tested it nominally on macOS 11 (Big Sur), but the process is this:
1. dupe a copy of LC Community 7.1.4, inside the apps bundle, replace the binary file
in ...app/Contents/MacOS/LiveCode-Community with one from LC Community 8.x
2. launch the app

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So you'll actually be running LCC v.8s 64bit capable engine, but with v.7s IDE stacks (all of the newer features of 8 engine, like widgets, being hidden/unused)

LC 7 engine can't run past 10.14 Mohave because it's only 32bit (same problem as SuperCard).
LC 8 had both 32/64bit on' Mac OS. Apple makes a command line tool called Lipo that can be used to strip unused architectures from their fat binaries, it is actually used by the standalone builder stack.
LCC 9 on macOS is 64bit only for both the IDE engine and its deploy version of Mac OS 'Standalone' engine. This means 9 can't easily back-deploy standalone apps to now very old macOS versions (10.4 - 10.14), unless maybe you could use the platform agnostic Emscripten/HTML5 engine in conjunction a modern Web / JS engine, a 32bit version of 9 engine for macOS was never built.
LCC 8 macOS deploy engine however, can build 32bit, 64bit, or both (fat).

Slightly off topic, but I've recently read about an executable format that was invented that is a cross platform 'fat' binary. Same binary launching on Windows, Linux, etc. very clever stuff.
https://justine.lol/ape.html
It actually works (for non-GUI stuff), tested myself:

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[richmond62]

1. dupe a copy of LC Community 7.1.4, inside the apps bundle, replace the binary file
in ...app/Contents/MacOS/LiveCode-Community with one from LC Community 8.x
2. launch the app

Unfortunately that did not work on MacOS 12:
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The ONLY file I copied over from LC 8.0.0 was this one:
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As I am just about to jump on the bus [the car is in the 'hospital' for its yearly once-over] to work and will not be home for
about 11 hours, and by then semi-moribund, will make no further experiments today.

[richmond62]

Funny what you find while poking around inside Livecode:

That's probably what that surgeon said when she located your appendix.

My grandfather, a surgeon, always said the appendix was a proof that God did not make humans if he were perfect.

(Untangle that one over breakfast.)

He also remarked that, while the Bible was a jolly interesting book, if God had given us a repair manual for the human body things would have been considerably easier.

The things lying around in LC 963 prove 2 things:

1. God did not create LiveCode.

2. A 'certain person' should come down off his pedestal and stop holding forth like an omniscient guru.

It is 'a pity' that with the release of the LC Open Source series, the creator(s) did not think to write a "How and Why" manual as they went along: instead, making some things unbelievably obscure.

[richmond62]

Re SuperCard . . .

I wonder why they are just not bothering:

1. LC put them out of business?

2. Ever-shrinking market?

3. Terminal ennui?

I did actually write to them asking if they would make their source code freely available . . .

[richmond62]

Re the 'engine swap': from which of the extensive 8.x.x series did you swap the engine?

I tried with 8.0.0 on macOS 12 and the beast did not work, and I wondered if . . .

[tperry2x]

How about this for a weird idea, a strange creation.
What I've just done is take the mac version of OXT RC4, the newest build from Paul that I can get my hands on.
Then, I performed the file swap technique with all my changes that I'd been performing with the Lite version.

The result is something I'm really pleased with. (Compressed it into a 7z archive while I write this - 357.4MB), but the end result is all of Paul's hard work, with all the improvements I had previously made. I'll have to come up with another splash screen, but I think it's almost there in my opinion. (sans the better tools icons that I plan to also do something about).

Sorry for the dodgy resolution - this is being done on an older mac.

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I also did a new icon for it, which matches into the one I made for the OXT Lite hack.

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This a better picture, and shows what happens when you run this in Mac OS 10.15 Catalina
The dark mode is as expected.... kind of. Note, the 'Dark Mode' is off on the inspector palette, yet the stack has dark appearance.
Mostly, things behave as they should.

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OXT RC4 "Chimera"?

[richmond62]

Well, 'Wot Do Yoo No'?

Here's LC7.1.4 with the engine from LC 8.2.0 dp 2 'in its intestines' . . . BUT: that's on macOS 10.7.5 "Tired Lion": as I am at work [lunch break], BUT I bet a pair of my old, sweaty socks, that that will NOT behave itself (i.e. run on macOS 12) . . .
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What has become increasingly obvious to me is that Apple have been making backward compatibility less and less possible through the macOS 11,12,13 14 sequence.

Personally I blame it on Craig Federighi, his increasingly campy self-presentation, and his 'out-there' hairstyle:
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Craig may have 4 children, but that does NOT stop his hairstyle from being extremely POOFY.