Here’s an update.
I’ve never found any version of Photoshop below version 4.0 (which works on my SE/30 but on my SE ) that displays a graphic at it’s 100% size, full screen, without the menu bar. If you know how to do that, please let me know. The reason why I prefer Photoshop over any other apps because it typically opens files that I make on a modern computer, or as others give me a lot of trouble which I will explain below.
Folks on Facebook suggested I try PowerPoint 1.0, and while that does display content full screen, it shrinks that content down and put a forced margin around it, which is totally ridiculous and I don’t understand why it does that. It also forces me to have title text that cannot be deleted! In other words, even the earliest versions of PowerPoint cannot be used to display a graphic at it’s 100% actual size.
SuperPaint Deluxe does not work because even though it displays the graphic at 100% size, there’s no way to get rid of the menu bar!
FullPaint crashes on every OS flavor of System 7, and even crashes under 6.0.8 for me. So I would have to go even lower than that to get it to work, I think. But I fear it probably would not open modern versions of the graphic files (TIFF files), which is about the only format that seems to be fairly universal, if I leave compression off.
I spent two hours yesterday, staying up till 2 o’clock in the morning, fiddling with HyperCard — the version that will work on the SE. Even though I’ve read it works with TIFF files, it doesn’t. I created a pixel perfect black and white TIFF without compression on my modern Mac, but it wouldn’t import into HyperCard. Even when I open it in a vintage graphics app and re-save it as a tiff, it still wouldn’t open in HyperCard. That proves that older versions of HyperCard just don’t like TIFF files.
I tried using Graphic Converter on my vintage Mac to make a MacPaint version of my TIFFs, but Graphic Converter foolishly makes a huge canvas and then puts the image in the middle of that, and HyperCard won’t let me center it as a background image on cards!
I finally tested Canvas 3.5.3 and found that it allows me to save my TIFF files as proper MacPaint files and it does not shift the image or make a huge canvas, which is what I need. But it’s still a lot of trouble because I have to re-save every image through Canvas instead of being able to directly import them into HyperCard.
All said, I’m very tired right now and I’ll fiddle around with it more when I have time.
Thank you for the advice and tips to date.