This hasn't been the easiest task but here's a few tricks I've learned:
For some reason the original Hypercard stack would not open with the current Revolution nor most of the previous versions. I was able to open it using Metacard 2.4.3 and then resave it, whereas Revolution would then open it. Very early versions of Rev may have opened it but I did not try back that far. Others said it may have been as simple as compressing the stack before opening, but without Hypercard to do that with, I had to find the other way.
Since I no longer have an OS that runs Hypercard, or even Hypercard itself, I'm not able to use the original stack to refresh on how it was supposed to work. (Folks suggested getting one of the programs that allow you to emulate the old classic OS, but as I'd found alternate ways to get the data out, I did not end up needing that solution.) Even the documentation I'd written which was many pages long was in a DocMaker format which is also not supported on OSX nor did I find a program that would access the old files.
I did find a workaround. An application called Rezilla allowed me into the Resource Fork of the DocMaker files, where I could copy and paste the How To manual I'd written for the game and paste it into my Apple Pages program where I could revise it and give thought to how to incorporate it into the revised game. Reading the game manual also helped me to get back up to speed on how the game worked. It was all stored in TEXT resources.
Also, Rezilla was a godsend that allowed me into the Resource Fork of the original Hypercard stack, which was where all the graphics and sounds were stored. While I did not use the original graphics and sounds, I was able to copy them as files and put them in a folder that I could later go thru, image by image, and come up with newer better replacement graphics. At least with Rezilla I could see what graphics/sounds I needed to have to revamp this game.
Also, I'd used quite a few externals such as CreditsDialog. Looking at the code told me nothing about what the CreditsDialog call should pull up. But studying the Resource Fork with Rezllla showed me what the CreditsDialog external was displaying so I knew what images to replace those segments of code with. I had used that to display graphical good news/bad news windows during the game. Whenever you reach a milestone a window pops up with an image and message. So unlike the name which would lead you to believe it was simply used for "About this program...) the CreditsDialog was an integral part of the game experience.
Another external I'd used in the original game was Listoid, which allowed the creation of a bunch of little palette windows with information displayed. That was easier to recreate in Rev since I just made sub-stacks for this. The "Find Folder" external was no longer necessary having the built in Rev "specialFolderPath" function.
Of course all the AddColor calls, which were sprinkled like salt and pepper thru every piece of the code, all needed to be replaced. As most of them included visual effects the replace was simply "lock screen, show/hide/update whatever, unlock with visual effect"
Another issue I encountered was with the visual effects. Hypercard had effects that are missing in Rev. I had before created a simple stack that allowed me to create an effect in Quicktime and copy the raw data for the effect. I created various effects and pasted them as raw data into Custom Properties. On preOpenStack it put those Custom Properties into globals. "put the coolEffect of this stack into jaws" (jaws being a global) Then I could call those custom effects just as with the built in effects. I did have to have the program check for the availabilty of certain types of effects on each machine and use built in options if they were missing, but at least some folks would get the cooler effects.
Have not tackled the sound issue yet beyond discovering that this also will not be a simple issue. Perhaps business projects make the transition easily but games, not so much. I do know that multiple sounds was an integral part of the game, and the ability to randomize them so that it was not the same all the time.
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