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:

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. 👨‍🎨

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!

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.

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!

If you like HyperCard, or are HyperCard-curious, I'd like to share an early build of my HyperCard player for modern macOS, "Stacks". It runs stacks natively: no emulator, sound (with MacinTalk speech synthesis!), period-accurate typography.

There's an in-app browser for the Internet Archive's HyperCard collection, so you can explore thousands of stacks and run them with one click.

Still early days with rough edges, but I'm having fun with it. Please report bugs!

https://morphing.cloud/hypercard

Snow v1.5.0 is out!

This release brings A/UX support, an emulated printer, new CD features, floppy writeback support and many other improvements and features!

Thanks to everyone that has contributed to this release in one way or another.

See https://github.com/twvd/snow/releases/tag/v1.5.0 for full release notes and downloads

Ugh, a New York-level density of Bugs all up in my desktop. Get off my Control Strip! 😡

Exploring the Final Frontier of third party module support...

Finally making some headway on this after months of wheel-spinning. 😵‍💫

What if... #pico8 #tweetcart, but macOS screensaver??

I'm happy to share the first bite-sized output from my After Dark hijinks:

Lunacy, a Lunatic Fringe After Dark module player for modern Apple platforms.

https://morphing.cloud/lunacy

Run an emulated Motorola 68k CPU! Fly around and shoot things like it's 1993! Chase a spot on the global leaderboard!

Thanks to Ben Haller for creating Lunatic Fringe.
Thanks to Greg Parker for carrying the torch through the PPC+Intel years with Fringe Player.

I hope this sparks a bit of joy.

After countless hours debugging, I'm very happy to announce A/UX 3.1.1 (and probably other versions) boots and seems mostly stable!

You can try it yourself in Snow bleeding edge right now! Note you _must_ set mouse emulation to 'relative' or you won't have a mouse and things will crash.

Please report any issues :)

Thanks, but not the high res After Dark 3.0 box art I was looking for.

(anyone out there have high res box art for 1 and 3?)

I'm making steady progress on my macOS HyperCard player and feeling good about this in-app Internet Archive browser with search and "click to play" functionality.

Sadly stacks on IA are not stored in a consistent file format, so I have to brute force download the Mini vMac disk image and rip the stacks out of HFS, but it's only a couple MB of overhead and cached client-side.

Huge thanks to the @internetarchive for making the search API publicly available and free. ❤️

"Like an index card, you say..." 🤔