Many years ago, I had a little MacSE with Hypercard 1.0 to play around with. The machine as long since given up the ghost, but I would dearly love to have the software to play with again, as I found it remarkably useful.
Has anyone come out with such a thing in the last several years, or is there at least something similar? I was specifically using the graphics aspect of it, and using the button capability to crosslink the various cards in my stacks into multidimensional arrays. I never had a manual for the programming language, so that was never an issue.
Is there an equivalent/similarity for PC (running WinXP Home), or would I be best off picking up another cheap Mac to run this? Any clues would be helpful.
This site lists some possible alternatives to HyperCard. Most should have Windows compatible versions. The site is a little dated, but I believe all of software listed there are still being developed. Check their individual product websites for more info on each. MetaCard and SuperCard in particular are very overpowered versions of HyperCard, but they seem (in my experience) to be the closest to HyperCard in terms of features, design, etc.
As you can see, though, none of these alternatives are cheap.
As of now, the FreeCard open source project is incomplete. This looks promising as a free alternative to HyperCard, but it seems that some time is still needed before a public version becomes available.
I do not know of any shareware HyperCard clones for Windows. Perhaps someone else does…I would also be interested in a non-commercial HyperCard clone for Windows.
Ok, I have to ask, what’s a “hypercard?” The site you referenced seems to describe it as some kind of interactive word processing program or text converter?
It was a very unique visual programming/data storage application. You created “cards” with various interface elements that received events which you write handlers for. You could create new cards from custom templates, and each card could be able to store similar data, like rows in a database. You could do lots of other stuff with it also. One of its earlier applications was to make stuff like what PowerPoint does today. Also, the core of Myst was programmed in HyperCard.
You might want to consider buying an old 68040 mac, getting the ROM image off it, and running Basilisk II. This is an emulator that lets you have a virtual mac on your PC. Of course you’ll still need to obtain Hypercard and an old version of MacOS to install on it. It’s a bit of work to set up, but it really is sweet once you get it going.
Note: the legality of this is discussed on the ROM image page. Apple does not seem to care.
Hypercard has gone the way of the dinosaurs on the Mac platform, too, although its intellectual progeny are many.
In additional to Basilisk, you can emulate a Mac using vMac. Under vMac, you’d end up with a virtual Mac much close to the SE you remember: it’s a Plus emulator and will boot anything from System 1.1 on up to 7.5.5 on a 9 inch black and white screen with up to 4 MB RAM. As with Basilisk, you need a ROM, although the ROM you need in this case would be a Mac Plus ROM.
Email me back channel if you want more information on either program.
(both are also available for the modern Macintosh to run ancient legacy Mac stuff, btw :))
Thanks, folks! Hyperstudio looks like my best bet at this point, since it’s out for Windows and under a thousand bucks (yeesh!). I find it mind-boggling that something so useful isn’t more available than this.
There was an old clone for DOS called HyperPAD. I bought it from one of those shareware catalogs back in the day, but a couple of the disks were bad - and they’re 5-1/4" disks so I can’t read them anymore. You may be able to find it on the net somewhere.
You might also want to look at PLUS if it’s still available.
IMO, having used HyperCard in the past, the currently very-popular program Flash by Macromedia does everything HyperCard used to do, and infinitely more. If you enjoyed HyperCard, I’d heartily recommend Flash. Somewhat more complex, but still easy to jump into.