Jeff Halter

@halcyon@bitbang.social · Joined ⁨Nov⁩ ⁨2022⁩

Drunk on 90's computing nostalgia, hacking on After Dark, HyperCard, and Hotline.

morphing.cloud
morphing.cloud verified

Replying to a post on ⁨discuss.systems⁩

@gparker @csilverman @root42 Ah, I'm super slow to recognize that you are Greg of Sealie Software. I sent you an email a couple weeks back re: Fringe Player, but maybe it was relegated to your spam folder. Your comment regarding the pain of the dynamic shared library was prescient, but after months of head+wall banging I've made big progress in getting most modules through 4.0 running! I'm really close to sharing this project.

If you like HyperCard, or are HyperCard-curious, I'd like to share an early build of my HyperCard player for modern macOS, "Stacks". It runs stacks natively: no emulator, sound (with MacinTalk speech synthesis!), period-accurate typography.

There's an in-app browser for the Internet Archive's HyperCard collection, so you can explore thousands of stacks and run them with one click.

Still early days with rough edges, but I'm having fun with it. Please report bugs!

morphing.cloud/hypercard

I'm happy to share the first bite-sized output from my After Dark hijinks:

Lunacy, a Lunatic Fringe After Dark module player for modern Apple platforms.

morphing.cloud/lunacy

Run an emulated Motorola 68k CPU! Fly around and shoot things like it's 1993! Chase a spot on the global leaderboard!

Thanks to Ben Haller for creating Lunatic Fringe.
Thanks to Greg Parker for carrying the torch through the PPC+Intel years with Fringe Player.

I hope this sparks a bit of joy.

I'm making steady progress on my macOS HyperCard player and feeling good about this in-app Internet Archive browser with search and "click to play" functionality.

Sadly stacks on IA are not stored in a consistent file format, so I have to brute force download the Mini vMac disk image and rip the stacks out of HFS, but it's only a couple MB of overhead and cached client-side.

Huge thanks to the @internetarchive for making the search API publicly available and free. ❤️