Get Info: #hypercard

See the sky: Thoru Yamamoto’s Christmas story, for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Thoru Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本徹 or とーるやまもと), born 1955, is a Japanese multimedia artist. Over the years he has released work in many formats including, but not limited to: magazine illustrations, HyperCard decks, interactive CD-ROMs, printed books, websites, digital stickers, and videos. He is perhaps best known for his story books distributed as HyperCard stacks and his unique 1-bit art taking advantage of the limitation imposed by early Apple Macintosh computers.

See the sky is one such story book, a Christmas present released in October 1992 as a series of HyperCard stacks. In 1996 it was re-released in a remastered form: as an interactive CD-ROM, produced using Macromedia Director, which added ambient music and navigation to the original images. Also released in 1996 was a printed book of the story, presented as 3 images per page. Finally, in 1999 a CD-R of the combined HyperCard stacks was released.

A new edition for 2023

I’ve created a new version of See the sky for Playdate. The remastering/remaking/porting process was quite involved, so I’d like to detail it in this blog post.

Extracting the original images

I used HyperCardPreview to export the assets from the original HyperCard stack. I did this back in October 2022, and had to use an old MacBook Pro running Mojave to do it.

Just today, whilst writing this blog post, I figured out that HyperCardPreview will refuse to open stacks if the app Stacksmith is also present on your Mac!? As soon as I deleted Stacksmith, HyperCardPreview opened the files just fine. It seems to be some sort of issue with them competing for control of the com.apple.hypercard.stack uti. Weird.

Anyway, See the sky consists of just over 500 full screen card images. For other stacks, you might get a combination of background images and card images that would need re-compositing - it really depends on the stack.

Thoru told me that when he first started out with HyperCard he wasn’t aware of the benefits of using a common background card and different foreground cards, which is why See the sky consists of only foreground cards. For this reason it was very difficult for him to upload the files, which were rather large for the time. Later productions would make more effective use of background cards to keep the file size as small as possible.

Implementing a viewer

My way of developing is to think of the goal as clearly as possible, then get something up and working as quickly as possible, and after that iterate and refine until I reach the goal. So it was easy to create a sort of slideshow viewer for the images, keeping track of the current image and allowing navigation forwards and backwards with A and B buttons, loading the next/previous image as required. Pretty quickly it became apparent that I could not simply display each screen centred as important content would frequently be out of view.

Adjusting each screen

So I added a table to store offsets for each screen. But defining these manually would be very time consuming so I set about creating an interactive way to do this. I added a debug mode in which I map the d-pad (cursor keys) to move the current image up/down/left/right, along with the ability to save the offsets table to a file. This was a huge productivity boost! But I was still finding it quite a repetitive task, so I added further key mappings so I could use the numbers on the numeric pad of my keyboard to quickly set the offsets for a screen to each of the 8 compass directions, or centred. This increased productivity even more. At this point I found myself setting the same offsets for a screen as the previous screen, so I added to more keys to copy the offset from the previous/following screen. All in all this made setting offsets for 500 screens quick and easy. When I was happy I copied the offset table into the code and that became the default values.

This is all to say that whilst the original Macintosh resolution of 512×342 does not match the Playdate’s resolution of 400×240, See the sky still works on Playdate because every screen has been manually repositioned to keep the important elements in view, a process similar to the “pan and scan” adaptation of movies for 4:3 TVs.

HyperCard look and feel

The most recognisable feature of many HyperCard stacks are the crossfades between screens. This was essential to the experience. Thoru even took advantage of the crossfade in certain scenes by changing only small elements from screen to screen so that the crossfade turned into a sort of stop-motion animation effect.

To achieve the crossfade on Playdate I do the following:

Before the transition I capture the current screen using playdate.graphics.getWorkingImage()
Next I make this image into an overlay, in my case I’m assigning it to a “fade” sprite
Behind the fade image/sprite I load in the requested next/previous image
Finally I use playdate.graphics.image:fadedImage(alpha, Bayer8x8) to fade out the overlay, which happens over several frames and results in the image becoming more and more transparent, eventually disappearing completely

So the crossfade is simply one image fading away and the image behind it slowly being revealed. Magic.

I also added the ability to have slower or faster crossfades depending on your preference. I do this by adjusting the refresh/frame rate of the game itself, rather than skipping any of the fade.

The only other feature I needed to add was a flashing capability. This happens at a handful of places in the story to various degrees, mostly there are a few flashes in places but in one places there are 10 flashes. Given that people with photosensitive epilepsy won’t want to see the screen flash I honour the Playdate “reduce flashing” system setting. If the user has that toggled on the story will only flash once at each instance. The speed of the flashing is quite slow, and not tied to the speed of the crossfade.

Page turn sounds are recordings of the sounds defined in the original HyperCard stack, another essential part of the experience. Thoru describes these sounds as “pipo papo” and that’s how I label it in the settings. I also provide the option to use a more realistic page turn sound, or switch off page turn sounds entirely.

Chapters

I added chapter navigation which unlocks as you go through the story, in a similar way to the 1996 CD-ROM release of See the sky. This means you can revisit any previous chapter, and once you’ve reached the end of the story you’ll have access to all chapters. If you want to reset that progress, for example to let somebody else enjoy the story from the beginning and remove any temptation for them to skip ahead, you can delete the “game data” through Playdate Settings. Chapter title cards are only shown when using the chapter navigation, and not whilst going through the story, I do this by injecting temporary images into the crossfade system.

Progress

I also added a progress bar, shown when you bring up the menu. It’s a vertical bar drawn in the centre of the screen between the menu and faded game image. The bar itself is dithered at 50%, and onto it I draw white markers for each chapter position. The current position is shown by drawing a solid white bar from the bottom of the screen to the current position. This means that the bar “fills” with white from the bottom as you progress through the story.

Experiments with sound

The 1996 CD-ROM release of See the sky has ambient music, but Thoru and myself couldn’t figure out the rights to this so it could not be used. I had done the work, just in case, so I’ll mention it here.

I extracted the audio from the Director files using a technique I’ve previously blogged about. I then converted the audio files to 44.1KHz 16-bit WAV files, and used Ocen Audio to remove the base noise from those files. Basically, you select a part of the audio that contains only noise and it removes this from the entire audio file. Doing this without first upsampling the audio meant it did not work as well or at all. After the de-noising, I converted to ADPCM using adpcm-xq which gave files half the original size at higher quality and with lower noise levels.

Experiments with music

After we realised we would not be able to use the ambient music, I looked at using completely different music, turning to the catalogue of watson @ MusMus. I found a piece of music for each chapter of the story and extracted loops using PyMusicLooper. I then tweaked the loops by adjusting their start point by moving a section of audio from one end to the other so the loop began with the part of the audio I thought sounded best. I use TwistedWave for most sound editing like this. Thoru really liked the music itself but was of the opinion that no music would be more honest to the original release. I can’t argue with that reasoning. Feel free to play your own choice of music whilst experiencing the story.

Optimising for size

The final app binary is tiny but the images are adding up to about 3MB. That’s fine, but I wondered how I might be able to optimise them. I used imagemagick’s montage command to stitch the images together into a grid. In Playdate land we call this an image table, but you might refer to it as a sprite sheet. This reduced the size of 500 separate card images from 3MB to a single image of just 2MB. A nice saving!

The 500 screen image table occupies 10.5MB RAM, so about two thirds of the available RAM on Playdate. Side-effects of bundling 500 screens as single file are a short delay on loading for users, a short delay on building for me as a developer, and the need to regenerate the single image if any of the images it contains are changed.

At this point, I could have stopped. I should have stopped. But, of course, I didn’t.

I’ve often wondered how the dimensions of a sprite sheet grid affect the file size when saved as a compressed format such as PNG. The extreme examples in this case would be having a tall grid of 1×504 or a wide grid of 504×1, and in between we have some exact multiples. I generated one sprite sheet for each grid size and here found that for this set of images a grid of 42×12 resulted in the smallest image file size a saving of a further 4% or so. The savings are similar when converted to the Playdate pdt image format. Note that this sort of optimisation only works for solid images, not for images with any alpha/transparency.

And that’s it. The final size of this new version is smaller than the original, mostly due to the image optimisation. I could make it even smaller by exporting all the final crops of the screen images, create a new image table of those, displaying them with zero offset. But I decided to not go there!

The result

You can download See the sky for Playdate from my page on itch.io, and it is a free download. A present from Thoru and myself. With best wishes for a Merry Christmas.

gingerbeardman.itch.io/see-the-sky

500 screens
10 chapters
~ 1 hour experience
Quick navigation menu unlocked as you go
Position is remembered between launches
Settings for sound and crossfade speed

Credits

Created by Thoru Yamamoto
Edited by Matt Sephton
© 1992 Thoru Yamamoto

Birthday blog post?

Check out my other #birthday blog posts.

Mouse-controlled Super Mario Kart clone for classic Macintosh

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It doesn’t get much more Japanese Macintosh than this!

There were only two mentions of this game on Google at the time of writing, and only one screenshot. So I felt it was worthwhile documenting the game in some detail.

My copy of the game, version 1.0, came on CD-ROM MacLife No. 161. This disc was included with the January 2002 issue of the Japanese magazine MacLife. This specific issue was released 9 months after the launch of OS X, so it’s interesting to see the magazine staff providing content - a folder labelled “Vintage”—for users of the older Mac OS, whether that was using the Classic environment of OS X or on legacy hardware.

HyperKart?

えもらのカート (Emora Kart) is a racing game created in June 1994 by OYU!-san (土屋悦男). It is named after the lead character, a somewhat dinosaur-like creature called Emora, who would go on to star in further releases by the author.

The game starts with a short qualifying course, which doubles as a tutorial. Finishing first on this course will unlock four further courses that are substantially bigger and more challenging. Finishing first on all courses unlocks a special course. Whilst the speed of the game is limited by the performance of the host computer you should be able to find a speed that is neither too slow nor too fast and have an enjoyable time with the game.

Your character automatically accelerates and you use the mouse to influence its direction. If the mouse pointer is too far away then it will have no effect, so it’s better if you trail the mouse pointer in front of the character at a short distance—a bit like a carrot on a stick - which gives the feeling that you’re almost pulling them around the track. The player can only move in straight lines and at 45-degrees which affects possible driving lines. And just like in Super Mario Kart there are coins littered around the track and they can be collected, not only by driving over them but also by clicking on them with the mouse pointer.

It’s interesting to note that this type of pointer control feels very much like a Wii game, which was a nice surprise. In particular I’m thinking of the way you guide your player in Pro Evolution Soccer, and the way you pick up things with the pointer in Super Mario Galaxy.

Fastest lap times are recorded and you need to make sure you do proper laps for them to register properly - cheating and shortcuts are discouraged! Driving off-road will cause you player to slow down and it will take time for them to accelerate back up to cruising speed once they are back on the track. Hitting track side obstacles will cause you to spin out and slow down. If your player stops completely, you’ll need to click on it to get it moving.

Features:

1-bit monochrome graphics
Created using HyperCard
Inspired by Super Mario Kart
Mouse-controlled aiming/steering
CPU-controlled opponent
6 characters with different stats
6 tracks of varying complexity
Construction guide included

The construction guide is really interesting addition. It’s an illustrated document that details how the game can be comprehensively modded using nothing but the game itself running inside HyperCard.

Where did this come from?

I found this game in my collection of Japanese Macintosh Magazine CD-ROMs, which at the time of writing consists of over 120 discs and almost 500,000 files. It’s a real treasure trove of old software that has many more secrets waiting to be rediscovered! You can help me preserve more lost software by joining my Patreon.

How can I play this game?

You can play the game in your web browser at archive.org/details/emora-kart though be warned it runs very slowly in this emulator.

Alternatively, you can download it to play on your real Macintosh or in a different emulator.

Shifting perspective

A sequel of sorts was made a couple of years later, in 1996. えもらのバギー (Emora Buggy) which shifted the camera to behind the player and featured simultaneous 2-player operation. Controls are now via keyboard, the window is much smaller, and the courses are shorter. The vibe is a mix of Out Run and Micro Machines and quite different to the first game.

HyperCard Hanafuda

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Good news, everyone!

For over a decade I’ve wondered if there was a 1-bit Hanafuda game for Macintosh made by somebody in Japan back in the day. It turns out there is!

It’s called 花札スタック (Hanafuda Stack) and was created by Kenji Chihara (千原健次氏)in 1992/3 using HyperCard. YES! ✨🎴✨

I couldn’t find a single thing about this game online. My first Googlewhack!

According to menu system on the disc it came on, this game was the Winner of the Miyuki Oshige Award, the judges’ prize in the “1st HyperCard Stack Contest” which was sponsored by Japanese Macintosh magazine MacPower Monthly.

Where did this come from?

How can I play this game?

You can play it in your web browser right now at: archive.org/details/hanafuda-stack

Alternatively, you can download it to play on your real Macintosh or in an emulator.

Version history

This page refers to version 0.6. However, the DOS game HP-華時雨 (HP-Hana Shigure) from 1997 says that it reuses, with permission, the card images from version 0.8 of Hanafuda Stack.

Hanafuda Resources

If you’re into Hanafuda, be sure to check out the Hanafuda Discord and Fuda Wiki where a fantastic group of people from around the world are building a comprehensive resource for these traditional Japanese flower cards. There are rules for a multitude of different games (not just Koi-Koi), a list of over 300 Hanafuda video games and so much more. Come on!

I’m preserving vintage Macintosh magazine media

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 12:34:00 +0000

For a while now I’ve been collecting CD-ROMs and Floppy Disks that came with Japanese Macintosh magazines for the sake of preservation of classic Macintosh software and games.

These magazines were released before widespread adoption of the internet, when it was tricky to discover new software and even more difficult to obtain it. Buying a magazine with a disc containing hundreds or sometimes thousands of files was an easy way of getting the latest software. Of course, more than twenty years have now passed and software that was once common has all but disappeared. These magazine discs provide time capsules inside which live many long forgotten secrets.

This is such an amazing treasure trove of files, containing many long lost files of both English and Japanese origin. The scatter chart shows the range of date coverage of the collection, full file listings are searchable by file/directory name, file type, creator code at gingerbeardman.com/mmm/, by content at DiscMaster, and all files are uploaded to Internet Archive.

Archive status report

The archive as it stands (updated March 2025):

date range: 1991–2002
total media: 500 discs
total files: 1,086,536 files

Notable finds so far

JapanEase rolling demos of two gorgeous language learning HyperCard stacks from the early 1990s (one previously lost)
Hanafuda Stack from 1992/3 (previously zero google search results)
Emora Kart from 1994 (previously three google search results)
Unyo! 2 the infamous HyperCard stack version of the famous UNO card game, from 1995 (previously lost)
Tower Xmas Demo, a demo version of Yoot Saito’s Tower ~Christmas Disc~ add-on from December 1995 (previously lost)
Fans of Macromedia Shockwave and Osamu Sato uncovered a 1997/8 demo of Roly-Polys World Tour which is hugely exciting as the complete game remained lost to time (it has since been found, May 2023)
Pickle’s Pocket from 1998 is the first desktop toy and suite of tiny apps by Thoru Yamamoto (previously lost with zero screen grabs online)
MacCalligraphy Sansui Demo, version of Japanese calligraphy tool by Enzan-Hoshigumi from 1999 (previously lost) I also uncovered a promotional leaflet and demo guide from Wayback Machine
AsistantPickle from 2000 is a more advanced desktop toy and suite of tiny apps by Thoru Yamamoto (previously lost with zero screen grabs online)

My Patreon enables me to buy more discs to build out the database, finding more lost gems and sharing them once again with the world. I add missing discs to Internet Archive and the redump project and upload individual games to various Classic Macintosh archives.

Thanks for being on this journey with me!

Get Info: #hypercard

See the sky: Thoru Yamamoto’s Christmas story, for Playdate

A new edition for 2023

Extracting the original images

Implementing a viewer

Adjusting each screen

HyperCard look and feel

Chapters

Progress

Experiments with sound

Experiments with music

Optimising for size

The result

Credits

Further reading

Birthday blog post?

Mouse-controlled Super Mario Kart clone for classic Macintosh

HyperKart?

Where did this come from?

How can I play this game?

Shifting perspective

HyperCard Hanafuda

Where did this come from?

How can I play this game?

Version history

Hanafuda Resources

I’m preserving vintage Macintosh magazine media

Archive status report

Notable finds so far

Further reading