Jeff Halter

Surprising finding from deep down the After Dark rabbit hole: instead of a simple, straightforward static image, the After Dark 2.0 control panel faceplate was rendered *procedurally* with code that produced randomly positioned stars in the background! Every time the control panel opened, it rendered a slightly different faceplate. Wild! 🤯

This subtle behavior is seemingly unique to 2.0.

Here are 6 procedurally rendered examples that reveal different star positions if you look closely:

@sardaukar Hello! The emulation engine is portable to other platforms, so Linux should be possible. I do plan to release the engine under an open source license, but I need to focus on carrying Afterglow across the finish line first.

40+ years later, here's a #picotron implementation.

I'm still processing all of the cool stuff I saw at #vcfwest this weekend. So glad to finally attend!

One item that caught my eye was this 1985 issue of Creative Computing for sale at the book stand. "3-D fractals on my micro? Yes please!"

My jaw dropped when I opened the article to find, essentially, the Mountains screensaver from More After Dark, along with source for the algorithm in 3 languages! This must have looked bad-ass on a TRS-80 or Apple II at the time.

Best $1 purchase ever!

Wow, After Dark 1.0 sold for ~$40 in 1989 -- with only 10 modules. Around $108 adjusted for inflation. Pretty steep!

But I suppose the utility in preventing burn-in of expensive hardware made it worth the expense at the time?

DrawMorph: how it started/how it's going.

The DrawMorph module in After Dark 3.0 comes with a cute little drawing program for editing the animation frames that compose the morphing flip-book style animation. It's a complete one-off UI out of hundreds of modules, but I couldn't resist recreating it in Swift UI and adding a few modern quality of life affordances, like a timeline filmstrip and "show previous layer" onion skin. 👨‍🎨

@vga256 @msxpocky Oh wow, so cool to see this review! I'm a big fan of Cliff Johnson's work. During Marchintosh I was inspired by Renzo's post to port The Fool and His Money to the web using Ruffle, aiming for an April 1st release. I was a little late, but built this mostly complete and playable version here:

https://www.the-fool-and-his-money.com

If there's anyone out there who has physical copies of After Dark software and a scanner, please consider contributing box art scans to the Internet Archive so I can include cool spinn-y 3D boxes in my After Dark emulator.

I have After Dark 2.0, More After Dark and Star Trek, but anything else is needed.

Save me from buying all of this stuff on eBay! I would be so grateful! 🙏

I've updated Stacks to v1.0a18 with a new full screen zen mode and various compatibility fixes.

Zen mode feels much better on large displays than the previous "scale low res image to enormous size" behavior. The Manhole in particular looks fantastic!

Meanwhile, making progress on After Dark emulation and having fun creating gratuitous features that most people will not notice. Like: a Swift host-side re-implementation of the Fish picker, for the Fish 2.0, Fish Pro 3.0 and Fish World 4.0 modules -- with support for third party fish!

@atrus The HyperCard engine is portable, but the Swift app is not. So it's possible, but it'd mean re-implementing a good chunk of work.

I've released Stacks v1.0a17 with many compatibility fixes, with a focus on working through problems in the fascinating "HyperCard 10th Anniversary" stack from the Internet Archive.

What an amazing time capsule of Apple's history this thing is. Card 2 says that among others, the stack was presented to "Steve Jobs, Acting CEO" in late 1997. I can only imagine his enthusiasm!

It's also an absolute flex: animations, music, colors, speech, drag and drop. Not 100% working yet, but progress.

@chrisparana I'll be focused on improving playback compatibility for a long while, but maybe some day. 😅

Depending on what you want to accomplish, Decker may be a good option.

@OffTheBooks I’ll try to make that more clear in-app and maybe provide an internet archive source. So it’s working now?

@OffTheBooks @vga256 DinoMight should be working in the latest Stacks v1.0a16 release. The MacinTalk startup sequence "Welcome...to...Dine-ooh-ooooohh-might!" is hilarious. Hopefully that's how it's supposed to sound. 😂

I'm floored by all of the HyperCard enthusiasm out there! Wow.

I've released v1.0a16 with expanded stack compatibility -- including enough XFCN support to render the navigation menus in the "Apple Service Source May 1993" collection of stacks. This one is a huge download from the IA browser, but it's worth it. The exploded isometric pixellated diagrams are so fun to explore!

@OffTheBooks @vga256 Yeah, I suppose it is. It's a bummer that the HyperCard Stacks collection on IA is not a more complete, canonical source of what exists. It's a difficult problem.

@OffTheBooks @vga256 Ok, I have this working with the intro animation and speech. I'll release a new version soon after I do some more testing.

Thanks for point out this deck! Would be great to get this uploaded to the Internet Archive for easier viewing and preservation.

@vga256 @OffTheBooks Oof, that's awful.

I was able to grab DinoMight from the DiscMaster link for testing. I must be missing something obvious on how to download files w/ their resource fork intact from DiscMaster though -- I had to recombine the separate files and restore their type/creator info manually. Any tips appreciated. 🙏

@OffTheBooks @vga256 I'm happy to take a look, but that link is... not good. It's opening a bunch of scammy browser hijacking stuff?