FourthWorld wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 3:45 pm
I collected tons of CD-ROMs of HC archives back in the day, and amassed a vast collection of downloads as well.
A few years ago I devoted a couple days to going through them to look for things which might be useful converted to LC for modern audiences.
Didn't turn up any.
Informational stacks like the great Hypertextbook series have been more than replaced by Wikipedia and other web resources.
Most productivity tools from back then have either been replaced my more modern things or no longer make as much sense in our multi-user, multi-device world.
Most HC utilities were so specific to HC they have little to offer an LC user. Indeed, many were workarounds for features now built into the LC engine and IDE.
If you find a gem in those 30 year old archives I overlooked, I would sincerely be interested in seeing what it brings to this third decade of the 21st century.
I've done occasional dives like that over the years, I've found a few cool things beyond my own stacks, which obviously were cool in a timeless manner, lol
Besides the MIDI experiments including a patch librarian for a Yamaha FB-01 analog synth modules (which you can get free Software emulations of now that will import that data), I made a few games and externals... a kid's card matching game, a 3D Maze Game (used an external to render simple ray-cast rooms generated from an ASCII "map"), a Blackjack Game with vector cards graphics (a font) which I rebuilt in LC with full color SVG graphics, a Website Editor (HTML 2.x era), a stack that writes Postscript files from scratch (part of my prepress tools stack), a stack that controls QuarkXPress with a ton of AppleScripts (most of which should still work if I still had QuarkXpress), and then there's things like my Rhythm Grid and Virtual BASS Guitar Stack started as unfinished HyperCard stacks.
I remember a while back I found this stack simply showed how to get a bitfield from an arbitrary byte length of data using just HyperTalk, I already understood the concept, and I'm sure it's well documented online in Wikipedia exactly how to do that, but I found that interesting to see how to approach that without having any binaryDecode syntax available. I image that would be useful even as pseudo code for a student to look at. I recently implemented a similar conversion in Builder where I there is not a direct way to convert a four char OStype code into a 32bit integer.
True that a lot of stuff you once needed an external for moved from being resource add-ons XCMDs/XFCNs to being either integrated into the engine/IDE, or are now otherwise replaceable with integrated things ( such as sub-stacks for making palettes and funky dialog boxes), and I'mm still finding syntax that I didn't realize was available, but still not everything. "Builder" wouldn't exist if it could already do anything and everything, and do it at acceptable speed, or do it in it's own thread.
I'll give you an example off the top of my head that has no LiveCode equivalent, HyperMIDI...the only thing close to an equivalent of that (but still not yet feature parity) was my doing. There was also a GUI external that I used with it that had some nice custom sliders you could adjust in a sort of mouse swiping action (think like 10-Band EQ controls on a stereo), those can be done now without an add-on. My first LC based (non-widget) Mouse-Piano palette was practically a direct port of some of the stuff I was doing back when.
And at any rate, even if the reason is "Retro stuff is cool", as is the case for Archive.org (and for me still having those CDROMS), well that's good enough reason for me.
Interestingly, I see that apparently LC's 9.6.6 build fixes the bug where the Engine crashes when opening HyperCard stacks. I wonder what prompted a bug report that originated in 2009 to get any attention? Was it the bug survey? And did they fix the importing or did they just stop it from crashing the engine? At any rate, between Emulators, SuperCard, and the OXT redirect of HC Stacks to HyperCardPreview.app, my HyperCard "needs" are more than met.