Thank you

[Ian Bridges]

Looking at the recent threads, although there is no official announcement, it appears SuperCard is no more. 

I have to say after all these years, this is a sad moment. I've been a user of SuperCard since version 1 on my Mac SE/30 back in 1989, and over the years few pieces of software have given me as much pleasure as SuperCard has allowed me to explore ideas and build useful applications. For much of my life it's been on my "software I couldn't do without" list.

The work of Mark and Scott over the years keeping SuperCard alive through changes of ownership and changes in technology has been astounding and a credit to their dedication. It appears that in the end, being unable to bring it into the native Apple Silicon environment, has probably led to loss of users and an uneconomic proposition.

I'll take this moment to thank them for their years of work and support, they have been amazing. Mark deserves to be in the programmers hall of fame!

I'd also like to thank this group that I've been part of for so long. There are many names who've come and gone and I can't call out everyone, but a few stand out: Chilton Webb, who churned out externals at a crazy rate, got me into OpenGL programming which allowed me to take over his OpenGL external project, make a 3D modeller in SuperCard, and also do the Quartz external. Stephane Leys who for many years had his alternate SC editor (modulo PI), and also worked with (and pushed and prodded) me on OpenGL. John Johnson, for years of friendly advice and support, and everyone else (too many to name) who stuck with SuperCard for so long and helped make it the easiest development environment I've ever worked with. 

So I'm sad to see it go, but so happy and grateful to have been part of the journey.

Thank you all. I might go fire up the SE/30 for old times sake!

Ian B

[MARK LUCAS]

Hi Ian,

FWIW it's not that there isn't plenty I'd love to say about this subject, but until we establish what's become of Scott basically it's all moot.

Forms have been submitted, and the wheel grinds…

-Mark

[MARK LUCAS]

BTW while we're on the subject, in case anyone's curious for the past couple of months just for grins I've been playing around with running both Mac OS 9.2.1 and 10.14.6 (and supported versions of SuperCard) here under the freeware QEMU emulator on my M1 Mac Studio.

It's definitely SLOW and not as seamless as Parallels due to the present lack of guest tools for those OS versions, but surprisingly once I got everything set up performance was scarcely worse than on contemporaneous low-end hardware. Setup is pretty brutal, as the MacOS installer runs in single-user mode (which prevents QEMU from using just-in-time compilation to speed up things up).

Happily once you get past that hurdle though (and make some minor tweaks to your guest OS) here in Mojave SuperCard 4.8 runs about three to fifteen times slower than it would natively on a maxed-out Intel Mini. Under 9.2.1 things seem to run more or less the same speed as a real 68030 Mac (though I don't have one for reference, this is just going by vague decades-old recollections - if you actually DO have one handy it would be fun to run SuperBench and see!). 

Graphics-heavy stuff is the slowest on both of course (since currently hardware acceleration isn't available for either guest), while small tightly-written interpreter code blocks like a simple SuperTalk for each loop sometimes clock in only about three times slower. Boot time is around ninety seconds (plus another similar period of OS warm-up) but you can save snapshots (which take only a few seconds to load).

So if you still have the software, it turns out that (aside from the patience to get through setup) it's actually not that difficult nowadays to run both these legacy OSes SLOWLY (but completely FREE of charge) on Apple Silicon thanks to QEMU (except with modern screen resolution). You can even run both at the same time if you're REALLY feeling nostalgic! ;-)

Realistically I don't expect similar performance on low-end M series chips though - there just isn't enough computer laying around unused on those systems.

Anyway if you're curious (and have studly enough M-Series hardware and a bit of free time to burn) I'd be happy to walk you through setup and send along various SC scripts and AppleScripts I whipped up to facilitate communication between host and guest.

Don't think of it as anything more than a science project though - it's VERY handy (and entertaining) if you just need to fire up some old SuperCard project for five minutes to look at or grab something, but you're probably not really going to want to spend all day there…

At this rate though by the time Apple comes out with an M5 Ultra Studio, it should be MUCH closer to usable.

-Mark

On Jun 30, 2024, at 7:29 PM, Ian Bridges <i...@planetark.org.au> wrote:

[Ricardo Salvador]

Thank you for this, Mark, and I fully concur with Ian’s summary of gratitude for the long years of productivity and delight that you (and others) provided via SuperCard.

Seeing your note, I’m wondering whether there is a way to extract the scripts of SuperCard projects without executing them? As does everyone on this list, I’m sure, I have years of projects on hand, and while I don’t need run most of these now, there are a handful where it would be handy to preserve the logic and other info embedded in the scripts. If there’s a way to do this without going through the emulation and execution route, that would be very handy. Please excuse if this has previously been discussed and I’ve missed it.

Bottom line: my thanks and appreciation for all the wonders you’ve enabled through this magical development tool.

r

On Jun 30, 2024, at 9:35 PM, 'MARK LUCAS' via SuperCard Discussion <superca...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

BTW while we're on the subject, in case anyone's curious for the past couple of months just for grins I've been playing around with running both Mac OS 9.2.1 and 10.14.6 (and supported versions of SuperCard) here under the freeware QEMU emulator on my M1 Mac Studio.

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[MARK LUCAS]

I hope it doesn’t appear disrespectful, but I’d just finished answering this and was about to hit Send when the email about Scott arrived (and if I don’t post it soon I know I’ll forget):

AFAIK the only way to 100% reliably extract scripts from a SuperCard project is to open it in SuperCard. No other tool is capable of teasing apart a project file and systematically recovering anything inside. With some trial and error you could probably whuff up a shell script that would be 98% reliable (at least for unencrypted scripts with no data stored in them), but you’d still lose formatting.

That's actually the main reason I started messing around with UTM and QEMU in the first place (I mean I still HAVE a half-dozen Intel Macs that can run Mojave and SC just fine, including one I still use almost every day). But SuperCard projects are chock full of stuff besides scripts that simply can't be salvaged under a modern OS because they use proprietary undocumented Apple data structures that can only be accessed (and thus potentially converted to something supported by Cocoa) under one of the OS versions that supports Carbon (i.e., Mojave or earlier). 

At least it's nice to know that going forward this won't require a working pre-2018 Mac (which presumably ain't gonna get easier to find as time marches on).

-Mark

[Michael Corrinet]

All of us are sad about the problems with Supercard but sadder at the passing of a brother.

You're heart is clear.  Thank you.

You've helped me in the past and I am so grateful.

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[Ricardo Salvador]

Understood, Mark, and thanks for responding to this with your usual succinct and methodical laying out of the facts. I smiled as I read your caveat “AFAIK,” as I’m 100% certain that you’re the person with the greatest understanding of SuperCard and its file structures. 

In particular, thanks for persisting during this emotionally charged time. 

Best,

r

On Jul 2, 2024, at 11:14 AM, 'MARK LUCAS' via SuperCard Discussion <superca...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



[Michael Corrinet]

And if Mark does take charge, then: "MARK, DELEGATE!"  That's a lot of extra stress, draft people to help.

I have extensive training in English (credential in teaching up through middle school) and volunteer for editing, etc.  Free, not asking for a job, just helping get us through this period.

Also if we do a tribute, I'll happily compile comments, notes, etc. and give to the person making the project.

Whatever you guys decide.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/supercard-talk/5DA1603C-A456-4699-9888-62908C7E2128%40me.com.

[Keith Martin]

That's a big 'if' given the size of the project but a great shout, Michael. Mark, I'm also more than happy to step up as a volunteer if it's any help at all.

I did some fairly extensive proofing work with the docs for Scott about, oh, 18 years ago. To my eternal shame I dropped the ball (blindsided by life issues) so didn't complete it but that's ancient history and I have quite a bit more time now.

Keith

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Keith Martin
360 media specialist https://Mister360.co.uk
Contact and info https://ThatKeith.com
+44 (0)7909541365

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On 3 Jul 2024, at 16:02, Michael Corrinet <spiralmatr...@gmail.com> wrote: