Tiger breaks hyperCard?

Ben Rubinstein benr_mc at cogapp.com
Wed Sep 21 10:11:14 EDT 2005


A very late contribution to this thread.

Way back in 2005-07-04 kee nethery <kee at ...> wrote:
> If you are running Hypercard on the startup volume, it runs fine  
> until you try to edit a script. That does not work.
> 
> If you are running externals in Hypercard, no clue whether they still  
> function or not, I imagine they do, mostly.
> 
> If you want to edit scripts in Hypercard just create a small disk  
> image and plop Hypercard and the home stack into that virtual disk.  
> Then you can edit scripts just fine running that copy of Hypercard.
> 
> The offending code appears to me to be the script editor that is  
> separate code inside Hypercard.
> 
> The Apple tech support folks at WWDC had the following response when  
> I mentioned the problem "Hypercard is not supported, OS9 is not  
> supported, we cannot help you."

I upgraded to Tiger a month or two ago, and indeed found that creating a disk
image for HyperCard allowed me to carry on using it in the limited ways I needed.

Recently a museum client replaced a network of touchscreen workstations, running
a large and complex installation that we created about 7 years ago in C++,  with
Mac minis.  We tested the app first on a Mac mini (running Panther) - no probs.
By the time the order was made, we ended up with 14 Mac minis running Tiger; and
we're getting some intermittent problems.

I've traced at least one of the problems to the fact that a call to the Mac
toolbox routine PBGetCatInfoSync, to obtain the directory id of a folder at the
top level of a volume, returns 'fnfErr' (file/folder not found), under Tiger, if
the volume is the boot volume.  It's fine under Panther, as under all previous
systems for the last 7 years; it's fine if it's not the boot volume (eg a disk
image).

I can't be sure if this is the same bug that messes up the script editor in HC,
but the symptoms are obviously related.

As for Apple's comments: that's just bull.  It's true that HyperCard is not
supported; but they sell Tiger with the ability to run Classic apps, and they've
just screwed this up.  I'm sure it's accurate that they've no intention of
fixing it; but the fact is that they've recently introduced a new bug into the
Classic layer; thereby causing a great deal of inconvenience and expense to some
of their more loyal customers.  Bah humbug, etc.




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