HyperCard for today's Mac
HyperCard pour le Mac d'aujourd'hui
Stacks, cards, buttons. The scripts of 1987 wake up on the Mac of 2026, intact, as if they had only been asleep.
Free software, free of charge · macOS 10.13 and later · Intel and Apple Silicon · signed and notarised · what's new
Written in plain HyperTalk, and played in HC. Click a picture to watch the video; the stacks themselves are further down, in the demo stacks.
The pinball
The ball knows nothing of the table: it feels its
way ahead, and every mushroom carries its own script.
Written in plain HyperTalk. The ball
knows nothing of the table: it feels its way ahead at every step,
and every mushroom, every bumper, every target carries its own
script. To add one, you copy it.
Tetris
The falling piece is a single polygon button; the
board, a text of twenty lines.
Written in plain HyperTalk too. The
falling piece is a single polygon button that changes shape at
every rotation; the board is a plain text of twenty lines, and a
full row is just a line of text that gets deleted.
Space Invaders
Forty polygon buttons, after Tomohiro Nishikado's
monsters; the formation speeds up as it thins out.
Written in plain HyperTalk, as ever. The
forty invaders are polygon buttons, drawn after Tomohiro
Nishikado's little monsters; the formation moves as one, a plain
set the loc per invader, and hurries as it thins
out.
The brick breaker
Sixty rainbow bricks; off the edge of the paddle the
ball flies at an angle, and every brick makes it faster.
Written in plain HyperTalk, like the
others. The paddle and the ball are polygon buttons; the ball keeps
its position in decimal numbers, rounded only for display. Off the
middle of the paddle it goes straight back, off the edge up to
sixty degrees, and every brick broken makes it a little
faster.
backColor, foreColor, textColor.
For games, polygon buttons and the keysDown.
Download a stack, unzip it, then open it with HC: a double-click, or
File › Open Stack….
The pinball table from the video. The flippers are held with the
W and N keys. It is a construction set:
with the Button tool, copy a mushroom, paste it elsewhere, shape it
with the mouse, and play.
The hangman game: a gallows, a word to find, twenty-six letters. Play with the mouse or the keyboard; seven mistakes and the little man is hanged. The whole game lives in the stack script: open it, and add your own words.
▼ pendu.stack.zip
The Tetris we all know, in HyperTalk. The falling piece is a single
polygon button that changes shape at every rotation. Play with the
arrow keys, or with Q D to move,
Z to rotate, X to drop faster, and space
to let go. The whole game lives in the stack script.
Forty invaders made of polygon buttons, moving as one and speeding
up as you shoot them down. Four shelters that crumble, a saucer
that flies by now and then. Play with the arrow keys, or with
Q D to move and Z or space
to fire. The whole game lives in the stack script. The house
record: 1,470 points.
Sixty bricks in the colours of the rainbow, a paddle and a ball
made of polygon buttons. Off the middle of the paddle the ball goes
straight back, off the edge it flies at an angle, up to sixty
degrees; it speeds up a little with every brick. Play with the
arrow keys, or with Q D to move, and
Z or space to launch the ball.
A red-haired digger, boulders and diamonds: a homemade Boulder
Dash, loosely inspired. Every cell is a button carrying a colour
icon. Boulders fall and roll, but only a falling one crushes.
Fireflies explode on contact, and a crushed butterfly turns into
diamonds. Three caves, each one drawn as text in a hidden field.
Play with the arrow keys, or with W A
S D; R restarts the cave.
It needs HC 0.8.8.
A chomper, dots, four ghosts: a homemade Pac-Man, loosely
inspired. The maze is our own, and each ghost hunts its own way:
red charges, pink cuts you off, cyan closes in from the other
side, orange dawdles. A power pellet turns them blue and edible.
The characters are colour-icon buttons, moved point by point. Play
with the arrow keys, or with W A
S D. It needs HC 0.8.8.
A ship, rocks, a saucer: a homemade Asteroids, loosely inspired,
drawn entirely in white-outlined polygon buttons. The ship turns
and drifts on its momentum, space wraps around at the edges, rocks
break in two and then in four, and the heartbeat speeds up.
← → or A D to
turn, ↑ or W to thrust, space to fire,
↓ or S for hyperspace. It needs HC 0.8.8.
A red-haired pusher, crates and targets: a homemade Sokoban.
Thirteen warehouses, every one solved by the computer before it
went into the stack. A crate can be pushed, never pulled, so it
gets stuck fast. Play with the arrow keys, or W
A S D; U undoes
a move, R restarts, and a click on a square walks the
pusher there by the shortest path. The levels are written in XSB
notation in hidden fields, so a level found elsewhere pastes right
in. It needs HC 0.8.8.
A runner, gold bars and guards: a homemade Lode Runner, on the
original's 28 by 16 board. Run, climb, hang from the bars, and dig
the brick to the left (X) or to the right
(C): guards fall into the hole… which fills back in
after nine seconds. Take the last gold bar and a hidden ladder
appears. Eight levels. Run with the arrow keys, or W
A S D; R
restarts the level. It needs HC 0.8.8.
Made a stack with HC, a game, a tool, a curiosity? Send it in: the best ones will join the demo stacks, with your name.
.zip (right-click ›
Compress in the Finder).patricia [at] labynet [dot] fr
HC is free and will stay free. If you like it, you can help it grow: every donation, even a small one, funds its development.
Donations go through PayPal
HC.app into Applications.For a release older than 0.8.3, which is not notarised, macOS still says "HC is damaged" — it is not. Once, in the Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/HC.app