4/9/2023 0 Comments Hypercard slow sheepshaver![]() Installable in SheepShaver by manually following the install instructions that come with the software I've tested 3 builds, to different results: It would be really awesome to get this working on a modern machine since Power Macs aren't super easy to come by anymore. I thought I would quickly summarize my efforts/progress and see if anybody wants to help out. In my next post I’ll talk about the first obstacle on my path to jQuery bliss.Hey all! As far as I know, nobody has really put much effort into installing any Copland builds in an emulator. This should be a snap barring a few bumps in the road. I’ve got all the pesky artwork assets already done (well sort of, as we’ll see) and I have done all the logic before. JQuery has Drag ‘n’ Drop my map puzzles were based on Drag ‘n’ Drop. It wasn’t until jQuery came along that I thought, ah finally a usable, popular, and well-supported full-fledged API that I can use to do GUI type things in a web client without bothering my pretty little head about all the ugly warty browser incompatibilities, bugs, and other quirks that drove me insane when I attempted to “cook from scratch.” However, I always found their scripts too “Cut ‘n’ paste” -ey. Operations like attempted to encapsulate some of the browser incompatibility issues that plagued JavaScript client apps. I failed to invest heavily in JavaScript in the ensuing years, preferring server side code. Having just been left high and dry by the Hypercard fiasco, I wasn’t eager to hitch my wagon to another loser. ![]() I had always fantasized about leveraging the functionality of my old Hypercard stuff for the web, but my early experiments in 1996 with the first JavaScript proved klunky, and it looked like JavaScript was a bit of a joke. The following video is a screen capture of my antique Africa puzzle running on Hypercard 2.3 inside the SheepShaver Mac Classic emulator. Are you starting to get any ideas? I sure did. When you drop a piece close enough to its target location it plays a little audio, runs a little animation, pops a flag, and locks the piece in place. The most successful modules were the map modules where you drag regions to their appropriate places on a background map. One of the many things I built in Hypercard was a Drag and Drop Puzzle engine with plug-in modules. (This experience has served me well ever since, given that people who can read usually don’t!) Remember, this was at a time when Windows was barely a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye. Since I had small children in the early 90’s I was into building intuitive graphical interfaces for the pre-literate. That’s when I decided not to throw good money after bad, and I bailed. But by the early 90’s, Hypercard was all but forgotten, and (unbelievable as it may seem now) there was a some speculation that Apple Computer itself might even wind up as a footnote. The developer community thought they could keep Hypercard afloat by extending the crap out of it and developing outstanding applications against it, and I believe that if the web had been then what it is today we might have pulled it off. Almost the minute it came out Hypercard began to languish due to neglect, both technically and in terms of marketing and promotion. ![]() The developer community got it, but unfortunately Apple didn’t realize what they had. ![]() Hypercard was the easiest tool in existence at that time to build simple GUI’s with no fuss. For those too young to remember, Hypercard (released 1987) predated the web but had a lot of webbish elements, notably hyperlinks to objects within the confines of a classic Macintosh file system and scriptable buttons that controlled navigation and other actions when clicked. In the 90’s I did a lot of work with Hypercard. So if you aren’t up for reading a long multi-part techno-novela, scamper along now and go look for clips of Megan Fox or something. A lot of different realms come into play here. This series of posts is planned to document of some my adventures trying to leverage an abandoned Hypercard opus I did a long time ago.
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