doug@eris (Doug Merritt) (04/24/88)
1) From what I've heard, the binary file format of hypercard is undocumented. Has anyone reverse engineered it? Even partially? 2) I heard a rumor that Bill Atkinson said that he would release the binary specs if and when someone came up with a Hypercard lookalike on the IBM PC. Anyone know if this is true, or what it may imply? 3) A friend of mine wrote an article for BMUG that discusses Apple's patent on image compression, which *may* have something (everything?) to do with the hard part of the reverse engineering in #1 above. Anyone interested in a summary? It was in the Fall 1987 BMUG, I believe; author was Mark Thorson. 4) I'd like to be able to recognize hypercard binaries as such when they get thrown onto other systems (BBS's, Unix, etc). Is there a magic number or something that makes them easily identifiable? Thanks for any and all help. Doug Merritt doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug or sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
alibaba@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Alexander M. Rosenberg) (04/24/88)
HyperCard uses either 24 or 31 different compression schemes. I've forgotten which. This makes reverse engineering it very impossible, leading me to believe that HyperDA was written with help from Apple. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Alexander M. Rosenberg - INTERNET: alibaba@ucscb.ucsc.edu - Yoyodyne - - Crown College, UCSC - UUCP:...!ucbvax!ucscc!ucscb!alibaba- Propulsion - - Santa Cruz, CA 95064 - BITNET:alibaba%ucscb@ucscc.BITNET - Systems - - (408) 426-8869 - Disclaimer: Nobody is my employer - :-) - - - so nobody cares what I say. - -