
HyperCard Adventures - vmbrasseur
http://hypercardadventures.com
======
mambodog
This appears to be using my port of the PCE emulator[1]. It's also used on the
Internet Archive, which has a collection of HyperCard stacks which you can run
in the browser[2].

I have a short tutorial[3] for running HyperCard stacks locally which might be
interesting to anyone who has some stacks lying around on their filesystem, or
who just wants to play around with Mac OS 9.

[1] [https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

[2]
[https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)

[3] [https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard-
stack-2014](https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard-stack-2014)

------
DonHopkins
The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard

by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte

"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD,
and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home
in Los Gatos, California." ...

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-
hyp...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/)

Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:

[https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...](https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=false)

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction
Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

About PhotoCard:

[http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html](http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html)

PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store,
that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your
own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad,
iPhone or iPod touch.

Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has
created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send
postcards.

With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad,
iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US
Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard,
select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then,
flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your
PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card,
it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation,
send it off to any email or postal address in the world!

~~~
mistrial9
.. several million people in the US and Europe did this, in the 1960s and
1970s, and none of them built HyperCard. Please include a full perspective, as
emphasis on the chemical will be a plus to some, but a hard negative to many
more..

~~~
DonHopkins
I'm confused: Are you saying you think that everyone who took LSD should have
invented HyperCard? Or do you think I or Bill Atkinson meant that's what LSD
will make anyone who takes it do? Or that LSD is bad because only one in
several million who take it invent HyperCard? Or that nobody should use
HyperCard because it was invented by a drug crazed loonie? Or are there many
notorious software disasters you blame on LSD, like C++, X-Windows, or BSD
Unix? Can you hook me up with some PCP/IP? What are you getting at, exactly?

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think
that is a coincidence." -Unix-Haters Handbook

[http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf](http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf)

~~~
sp332
I think it's pretty clear that mistral9 means that you need more than just LSD
to create something like HyperCard, and maybe you don't need the LSD at all.

------
miki123211
I wish that thing were screen reader accessible. People are always saying how
easy it was to use and I really wantto experience it, though I sadly can't.
The only things the screen reader can see on the website are the power switch,
the paperclip button, the disk number and the copyright footer.

~~~
kalleboo
Unfortunately it's an emulator of a classic Motorola 68000 Macintosh, you
would need some kind of OCR technology to make it accessible

~~~
DonHopkins
Maybe it would be possible to run Berkeley System's "OutSpoken" screen reader
on the Mac emulator? (Berkeley Systems also developed the famous "After Dark"
screensaver with the flying toasters.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutSpoken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutSpoken)

"OutSpoken (styled outSPOKEN) was one of the first commercially available
screen readers for a graphical user interface (GUI). Its notable innovations
were the use of an off-screen model [1] and the mouse pointer as a review
cursor. The original Macintosh version was written by Wes Boyd and Bruce
Berkhalter at Berkeley Systems. OutSpoken was first released for the Macintosh
in 1989, and was the only screen reader ever available for the Macintosh prior
to VoiceOver. OutSpoken for Microsoft Windows was released in 1994 for Windows
3.1, and was widely recognized as one of the first truly effective screen
readers for Windows.[2] OutSpoken for Windows was developed primarily by Ben
Drees and Peter Korn, with user interface design by Marc Sutton and Joshua
Miele."

Oh rats, it looks like Outspoken is not compatible with HyperCard,
unfortunately:

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=3KBOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA79&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=3KBOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=%22outspoken%22+%22hypercard%22&source=bl&ots=ttWUBWFMZD&sig=ACfU3U3JslONELCf-
qQtdPUAl0lHiM0Jbg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwio6b-Bx9TgAhUR_aQKHf8xAA0Q6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22outspoken%22%20%22hypercard%22&f=false)

"The Outspoken user manual acknowledges some commercial applications with
which Outspoken cannot be used because of software incompatibilities. chief
among these is HyperCard, a very popular piece of Macintosh software.
Additionally, however, there is a whole range of software which is inherently
so visual that it would make no sense to attempt to use Outspoken -- all
drawing programs, for instance." -Extraordinary Human-Computer Interaction:
Interfaces for Users with Disabilities

I would suggest at least listening to Bill Atkinson's description of his LSD
trip that inspired HyperCard, which goes into eloquent details about what was
important about HyperCard, and is quite evocative.

Here's the transcript published in Mondo 2000:

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-
hyp...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/)

And the interview that's a transcript of:

[https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...](https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=false)

~~~
tyingq
[https://vipercard.net](https://vipercard.net) maybe? It appears to be
JavaScript, but it may render to a canvas, which wouldn't help much.

------
phibz
I first learned to program with HyperCard and HyperTalk. I owe my professional
career partly to it. It will always have a happy spot in my heart.

~~~
Waterluvian
Same. I learned hypercard on the family Apple II starting at maybe age 5. Made
all kinds of silly stuff. Eventually learned how to make rudimentary games.

It was one of the experiences that taught me that I control the computer, it's
not just a platform to run other's applications.

------
gdubs
This works surprisingly well on an iPhone. Glad people are out there keeping
HyperCard alive.

~~~
mch82
And perfectly on iPad 2018... amazing it’s possible to use Mac OS Classic in a
browser on an iPad. The touch to mouse translation support is better than on
most other apps too.

------
samcheng
Are those old Mac shareware games still alive in an emulator anywhere?

I vaguely remember one where you battled a knight early on, and then went on
to a modern battlefield... Hmm. I bet that box of 3.5-inch floppies is still
sitting around somewhere.

~~~
homarp
You can browse what the Internet Archive has
[https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac)

each of the disk runs in your browser, e.g.
[https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation](https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation)

~~~
samcheng
Thank you!

"Enchanted Scepters" was the game I was thinking of.

It always struck me as vaguely hypercard-based, but is actually built on a
different engine called "World Builder"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Builder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Builder)

~~~
jimmux
I've been trying to remember the name of this game for decades. I also thought
it had a HyperCard feel, which inspired me at 12 years old to attempt making
something similar.

I never completed that attempt, but it was my first serious programming effort
and I've been programming ever since.

I never managed to finish Enchanted Scepters, but it seems I can fix that now.

------
bane
Is this actually running in an emulated Mac?

~~~
spilk
appears so, yeah. probably very similar (if not the same) to the emscripten
version of PCE that they use over at archive.org:

[https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-
emulatio...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-emulation-
comes-to-the-archive/)

~~~
bluehex
The "Credits" HyperCard stack in "Macintosh HD" seems to confirm this.

------
watersb
OMG the paperclip

I logged hundreds of hours on HyperCard. This is wow.

~~~
benj111
My first thought was clippy.

Then I remembered how Apple don't like extraneous useless buttons.

Edit: The paperclip was to eject a stuck floppy if/when the system crashed.

~~~
blihp
There was also a functional reason to eliminate the eject button: a somewhat
common problem 'back in the day' was that users would remove/eject floppy
discs before they were done being written to. This could cause corruption
since there could be several seconds of writing after they clicked the save
button or copied a file. Even more fun were when applications or the OS would
write for a bit, stop for a couple seconds (and at this point some users would
see the disc light turn off and eject the disc) to do some other processing
then start writing again. Having the computer control when a disc could be
ejected did serve a purpose.

~~~
benj111
True. But there was (and still is) a risk of powering down the computer before
writing to disc has finished.

Plus I feel that a better user interface could have solved the problem better.
But maybe its 30 years too late for that conversation :)

------
mds123
First thing I wanted to do was fix the HD's system folder so it could boot
without the floppy. Hang on, there's no System folder on the floppy!

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I think it does boot from the HD, clicking the floppy icon just chooses the
floppy to have inserted when the system starts, as though the intent is for
more floppies to be available?

------
hguhghuff
What is this? Context?

~~~
jhbadger
No real context, it's just an emulated classic Mac with some installed
software (including Hypercard, an amazing for the time development system that
both influenced the Web and RAD tools like Visual Basic and Delphi). If you
ever used such a system it is nostalgic.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Had someone thought to publish HyperCard stacks on a network using URIs,
HyperCard might have become the web. I think that timeline might be a better
place than this one.

------
dgreensp
A lot of the stacks seem to be missing?

------
Svoka
I'm just playing GunShy now.

