(Sorry about taking so long to respond -- further follow-ups off list, of course.)
On 2003.11.9, at 05:15 AM, drieux wrote:
Begin forwarded message:
does anybody know how to make Hypercard run on System 9 or X?
I've been running a few hypercard apps on Mac OS 9 and X without much
problem. Of course, they aren't complicated apps, and I had to disable an
XCMD on one to run it.
does anyone here have a good pointer on how to get old style Hypercard stuff running on OSX? a friend of mine in the UK was wondering. The stuff works under the older Apple 8.5 but apparently not in 9 or OSX.
If there are problems, my first guess would be that the apps require XCMDs
and/or XFCNs (or whatever those were) that were written to an API that no
longer exists.
If that's the case, he'll probably either need to get the source code for those
and port them, or simply run them on an older system.
Depending on how vital the old hypercard apps are, and the difficulty of
getting the source code or porting them, or of getting old hardware that is
fast enough and dependable enough, he might want to look into Mac-on-
Linux: Buy a new Mac, wipe Mac OS X, install Linux, install MOL on that, install
the older system on top of that. It "should work". (YMMV) Since the emulation
is API-level only, they should run at native speed. It would be nice if the
Linux API emulation layer ran on Darwin, or if MOL ran native on Darwin,
but I don't believe either of those have been done yet.
One other thing to look into if he finds himself getting into porting (besides
Perl, of course) --
Runtime Revolution (which has bought the Metacard engine technology)
maintains a high level of compatibility with Hypercard. Metacard/RunRev
has an additional advantage of being cross-platform. I think I've also heard
that Supercard has been updated to Mac OS X, but I'm not sure.
HTH
Joel
