HyperCard stack

A HyperCard stack is a collection of text, images, and sometimes audio, organized using the metaphor of a stack of cards and made interactive using a scripting language called HyperTalk developed for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers.

Format info
HyperCard Stack consist of a Data Fork and a Resource Fork which contains all the Graphics, Fonts, Icons, Sounds, and other metadata.


 * Format description

Using HyperCard Directly
HyperCard stacks can (of course) be viewed in HyperCard through the use of an emulator such as Mini vMac or Sheepshaver

LiveCode
UPDATE: As of LiveCode 7+, there is a bug preventing HyperCard stacks from being imported - LiveCode will crash. This bug has been filed, but until a fix becomes available, use LiveCode 6 to open the stack, then other versions (or 6, if you wish) to edit the imported stack.

LiveCode (formerly RunRev, which in turn was formerly MetaCard) is able to import HyperCard stacks and save them in the LiveCode file format. Stacks can then be edited and published as standalone applications through LiveCode, which supports Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS and the web as deployment platforms. The community edition of LiveCode is free software (open source), and runs on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux. There is an online tutorial for converting HyperCard stacks into LiveCode

Stackimport / Stacksmith
Stackimport is "a command line tool that reads a HyperCard stack and generates a folder with XML and PBM files from it containing a more easily readable representation of its contents". It was made for Mac, but the Github link has instructions on how to compile on Linux. Stacksmith is a 'clone' of HyperCard (by the same author as Stackimport) that includes the code from Stackimport and so can natively import HyperCard stacks. Source code for both Stacksmith and Stackimport is available on GitHub, and a prebuilt binary (Mac only) of Stacksmith which also includes the binary for Stackimport can be found on the Stacksmith website.

Sample files

 * HyperCard stacks on Internet Archive
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/archive/hypercard/hypercardStack