HyperCard Comes Back From the Dead to the Web 117
TedCHoward writes "On the heels of the recent mention of HyperCard comes the launch of a brand new site called TileStack. Cnet's Webware blog writes, 'The idea behind it is to bring old HyperCard stacks back to life by putting them on the Web, meaning you can take some of those long lost creations from the late '80s and early '90s and make them working Web apps. You simply upload them to TileStack's servers and they'll be converted and hosted for just you or the entire world to use once again... Since the service runs without Flash... TileStack is perfect for the iPhone and other devices that run on the Web.' They also have a video showing the upload process."
Re:But can we make new stacks? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But can we make new stacks? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm new around here... (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks. This Web site is just allowing people to dig them up, dust them off, and play with them again (without paying for one of the commercial HyperCard programs still out there, or using a VM).
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that. Apple floppy disks were written with constant linear velocity --- i.e., as the head moves towards the centre of the disk, the rotation speed goes up so that the magnetic medium still passes the head at the same velocity.
PCs, and therefore all modern hardware, use constant angular velocity floppy disks --- the disk spins at a constant speed, so that the speed at which the magnetic medium passes the head varies depending where the head is. Yes, this is clearly a bad idea, but that's PCs for you.
This means that no modern hardware can read old Apple floppy disks. It's just not possible. You'll need an old Macintosh floppy drive and (probably) an old Macintosh floppy drive controller to plug it into, which basically means you need an old Macintosh. You still have yours, right? Right?
Have fun!
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.inkscape.org/ [inkscape.org]
http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]
http://www.getpaint.net/ [getpaint.net]
You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:2, Informative)
"If you have some old HyperCard stacks lying around on floppy disks that you can't read because you either don't have a computer with a floppy drive, then we'll gladly do our best to import them on our vintage hardware here in CodeFlare labs."
Their mailing address is in the FAQ for anyone who wants to give it a shot.
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:2, Informative)
Send your floppies in appropriate packaging to:
CodeFlare
5919 Greenville #335
Dallas, TX 75206-1906