mac

Running a Hypercard stack on a modern Mac

Hypercard in SheepShaver emulator

Updated: now works on Yosemite

A bunch of people have emailed me about getting Hypercard stacks running under emulation. Here is a pretty easy guide to running a Hypercard stack on a recent Mac (eg. running Mavericks, Mountain Lion, etc):

Place the Hypercard stack you want to access somewhere within your user folder: eg. Documents, or Desktop.

Download this zip file [95mb] containing the SheepShaver classic Mac emulator bundled with Mac OS 9 and Hypercard.

Extract and open hypercard.sheepvm. This should boot Mac OS 9.

On the Mac OS 9 desktop there should be a disk called "Unix". This is a virtual disk which actually lets you access files on your computer (eg. outside the emulator). Opening it is equivalent to opening your OS X /Users/ directory.

Why port emulators to the browser?

MacPaint Woodblock sample image

In a discussion on Hacker News about emulators being ported to the browser, I drew attention to my own project, PCE.js, which emulates a Macintosh Plus and an IBM PC/XT. Some of the questions brought up included why someone would undertake such a project, and also the legal considerations of including the software ROM required to boot the machine.

PCE.js - Classic Mac OS in the browser

PCE.js MacPaint screenshot

I've just completed porting Hampa Hug's excellent PCE emulator to run in the browser, using Emscripten. I've mainly focused on the pce-macplus build. This is pretty awesome because it means you can run classic Mac OS in the browser. Check it out: PCE.js - Classic Mac OS in the browser.

I've also got the pce-ibmpc build working (emulating an IBM compatible, up to a 286 CPU), and and pce-atarist, an Atari ST emulator also, with browser demos coming soon for each.

A dump of the source is available here but I'll try to clean it up and make it available on GitHub when I get the chance.

Update: source on GitHub, and I've added an IBM PC Demo.

Installing Pygame on Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion

I decided to install and play around with Pygame today, mainly as an excuse to write some Python for a minor departure from all the Javascript/Coffeescript I've been writing lately. Unfortunately the process wasn't entirely frictionless, due to Pygame not yet accounting for Apple's move to XQuartz as the recommended X11 implementation for Mac OS as of 10.8 Mountain Lion. As a result I ran into some compilation errors while Pygame was building it's native extensions, which fortunately were not too hard to fix as I had some familiarity with changes to X11 on Mountain Lion.

Setting up a new Mac for Node.js and Drupal development

So you've got a fresh, clean Mountain Lion install and you need to get up and running for local development. Recently I spent a day doing just that, so I thought I'd write it all down, to save me from having to look all this stuff up again.

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