Show HN: WildCard, a retro Hypercard/HyperTalk simulator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WildCard, a retro Hypercard/HyperTalk simulator

hypervariety.com

101 pointshyperhello16 comments

I cut my programming teeth on HyperCard long ago. I made WildCard over a period of about a month of free time. I'm not asking for any money; I just wanted to remember how much fun HyperCard was. The screens are bigger and better, but the stacks are still the same size!

The project shows off a number of wonderfully intuitive things about HyperCard, from the simple stack-of-cards architecture, to the readable english-ish script visibly defined in BNF.

Now featuring free accounts that let you share your stacks with the public...For example: https://hypervariety.com/WildCard/Staximus/

Have a good time and let me know if you used HyperCard!

I used HyperCard! I installed it from floppies!

HyperCard was my first experience with programming as well, made a few weird little games. My parents actually bought me Hypercard 3.0 for my birthday one year, I was super excited!

HyperCard 3.0 was an unreleased in-development version of HyperCard that Apple was developing in the late 1990s before the entire project was cancelled. So I suspect that wasn't the version your parents got you!

(On the other hand.... if it actually was, please get in touch! I've been looking for a copy for years.)

Ah, yes so it was. It must have been the final release, I believe it was when they introduced full colour support.

Another programmer who started with HyperCard here… it truly gave me my love of programming. The HyperTalk Bible WAS my Bible.

Very cool! I am also in the HyperCard as a first “reproductive system” boat.

I teach my 6-year old programming basics in Hypercard on an old Mac SE/30. It's really fun to watch him end up doing basically the same thing I used to do with it ~30 years ago... which is mostly make little animated choose your own adventure stories/games.

This Show HN project is fantastic!

Please let me know if there's any improvements you think your junior would appreciate, because I'm still adding stuff! My email's in profile.

HyperCard was great as a kid. I would make point-and-click adventure games. All drawn by hand. I didn't realize people used it for serious work until years later, when someone showed me their product tracking application they had made in HyperCard. Why didn't they just use Excel? Or MS Access? Who knows.

It's cool that people are trying to capture the essence of hypercard still. I think the right mix of modern and 1980s is out there waiting to be found.

Somewhat analogous is PowerPoint, where I delighted in making games and movies as a child. It was possible to trigger actions when buttons and on screen elements were clicked.

I used it as a poor man's Flash.

Whilst it isn't versatile like I hear HyperCard was, it taught me computers could be used to create interactive media. It taught me that software can be stretched beyond its stated goal. And eventually I became a programmer.

I have never tried a chrome book, but I hope there are still similar offerings in software for children looking to explore.

This is awesome! I'm trying it on an iPad and doing pretty well.

For anyone looking for a deeper experience, you can try https://livecode.com/ -- runs on Mac, windows and Linux, produces single-file executables, and has many enhancements over HyperCard while retaining many oF HC's strengths.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26062977

I posted the linked comment almost a year ago, but the incident happened much closer at the start of Covid. I didn't say it at the time, but I willingly say it now, LiveCode were the perpetrators. They employ the dark pattern of graciously offering free stuff for education during lockdown, because they are such good guys, and then will charge $1500 if someone forgets to cancel their offer. After the dashes is copy of the text from the other comment:

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I treat 'free but remember to cancel' plans as scams.

About 10 months ago I got emails from a company that developed an development environment that was I was mildly interested in. They presented an offer with said it was free so that people could help educate themselves during lockdown. Unfortunately the terms was after 1 year you needed to pay something like $1500 if you didn't cancel, these terms were right at the bottom of the page and very hard to spot. Paid through PayPal and the about $1500 was there right in front of me. I cancelled it on the same day.

A company offering that sort of deal waiting for people not to cancel and saying it is to help people during the lockdowns is just awful.

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Addenda: Unfortunately I don't have the original email for this any more, as I was annoyed and marked it as spam before copying any text like an idiot, and it vanished. Although I may be able to use the internet archive to recover the page the email sent me to. Aside: if anyone doesn't copy the text they wrote in a webpage to a text editor or something before they press the 'submit' button or equivalent, they may regret as I have a couple of times, if an AI or site error swallows their text, it's a good habit to get into.

Sorry, I just saw this reply. Sorry this happened to you. Obviously it's a long shot since it's been so long, but did you try reaching out to them at the time? I don't work there (I consulted with them long ago) but I still know several of the people there. I'd be surprised and disappointed if they didn't respond to a timely request for a refund.

Nice work!

Ward Cunningham, the father of wikis, loved HyperCard. I really liked Hypertalk and it seemed to me that this kind of language was missing in a wiki. So I explored this way: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech.

I would be curious to know what you think about it.

My HyperCard jam was building animations of tornadoes destroying trees and houses and stuff. Good middle school times.

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