HyperCard stack

Revision as of 20:04, 26 July 2020

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.

Format info

• Format description

Metaformat files

• Synalysis grammar file (for Hexinator / Synalize It!; more details)

Converting / Viewing HyperCard stacks

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.

See Also

• WOBA image format

Sample files

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

References

• HyperCard on Wikipedia
• Open Source HyperCard-related stuff
• The Definitive Guide to the HyperCard Stack File Format describes all known details of the HyperCard 2.x format
• Computer Chronicles: Introduction to Hypercard (video)
• Emulation of 1990s They Might Be Giants Hypercard stack (in Flash)