Display graphic FULL SCREEN on Mac SE?

[JDW]

What app will allow me to display a graphic FULL SCREEN that works on a Mac SE or Plus (4MB of RAM & 68000 CPU)?

Graphic Converter 1.7 won't work and neither will JPEGView 3. SuperPaint won't do it either. Same for Deneba Canvas 3.5.

I am talking about full screen with NO MENUBAR -- just the graphic only at the full 512x342 pixels. On my SE/30, I use Photoshop 4.0, but that doesn't work on an SE.

 

[Crutch]

I am guessing (again haven’t tried) that HyperCard follows the Mac UI guidelines and calls ObscureCursor when you start typing in a text field. If so, this will automatically hide the cursor and re-show it when the mouse is moved. No coding necessary.

 

[Mu0n]

Step 1 of proof:
Create a 512x342 test PICT in SuperPaint 2.0F in System 7.5.3 on Basilisk II for PC, so my small program can load it up (PICTs can come from wherever)

Step 2 of proof:
Save as PICT

Step 3 of proof:
Launch my program and open the PICT

Step 4 of Proof:
Run under mini-VMac

It would run under a Mac Plus (stock memory would be plenty since the program is TINY)

Does it work under System 1.1 (still mini-vMac)?

No sweat!

Let me know if this is good enough, if you need tweaks @JDW

 

[Mu0n]

Methodology to bring modern images from a modern computer to a Mac Plus:

I'm using a free copy that was made available by Adobe itself, CS2 (free link opened up like 10 years ago) on my modern win10 machine

Let's start with a std RGB 8bits per channel image file:

first change to Image/Mode/Grayscale

Then you have access to Image/Mode/Bitmap and choices:

72 pixels/inch is fine. you may play around with different settings to deal with colors slightly differently until you're satisfied

50% Threshold:

Pattern Dither:

Halftone Screen:

Diffusion Dither:

Double frequency halftone screen:

Tip: if none are looking good enough for you, play with the brightness and contrast BEFORE discarding color information, or at the grayscale step. Many results can be achieved that way.


Save as PICT:

Without closing Basilisk II at all, I reach into a host drive that was mounted in the GUI before launching the emulator and find my file and copy it to my mounted virtual volumes in my emulator environment:

 

[Mu0n]

Here's a .sit file with the program, my example 2 PICT files and the THINK C 6.0 project file (and additional library files, you need misc.c and misc.h as well as link the standard library MacTraps to compile and build it - but don't worry, the program is already built and included)

 

[retr01]

Thanks, @Mu0n.

Other straightforward and fewer steps exist to achieve 1-bit images from modern images are possible, too.

 

[JDW]

If you use ResEdit to modify the cursor for HyperCard to be zero pixels, you can use the "set cursor" command to set the cursor to one that you've modified with no pixels.

Not sure if this is a HyperCard v2.3 problem, but when I add the line "set cursor to watch" (just as a test) in the button script, when I click the button (which also hides the menubar), the cursor changes to watch and then back again so fast I almost cannot see the watch at all. I tried adding "set userLevel to 5" in a line prior to that, but it didn't help. As such, even if I do the ResEdit trick, if I cannot even get the cursor to change to be a watch, would it work?

I still have the SuperMac SpeedCard installed. Curious if this is yet another SpeedCard quirk.

 

[pocketscience]

To answer the original question… I’ve used AfterDark to do exactly this and with hot corners you can pull up the image quickly and get rid of it just as quick…

 

[JDW]

Here's a .sit file with the program, my example 2 PICT files and the THINK C 6.0 project file (and additional library files, you need misc.c and misc.h as well as link the standard library MacTraps to compile and build it - but don't worry, the program is already built and included)

Holy cow! I am going to test that in Mini vMac now, and if it works, I will test it on the actual SE.
Thank you!

UPDATE: I found it works in Mini vMac under System 6 or 7 to open the PICT files you kindly provided. It's a pretty slick little app. However, your screenshot notwithstanding, I cannot see any way to get a modern version of Photoshop or Affinity Photo to save a PICT file while running under a modern version of MacOS.

The lack of a PICT format in the export or save dialogs has been true for a long time now on modern Macs. So I would need to save as TIFF on a modern Mac and then go through the extra steps of using another graphics app like Canvas or Photoshop v1.1 on a vintage Mac (or Mini vMac) to convert the TIFF file format to PICT in order to use your amazing little app. I even tried to open MacPaint files (created on a vintage Mac), but that didn't work either. So the app seems to want only PICT files. Please don't take this the wrong way. I think your app is great. But if it was able to open files other than PICT, it would suddenly enter the magical realm of Insanely Great.

 

[YMK]

Not sure if this is a HyperCard v2.3 problem, but when I add the line "set cursor to watch" (just as a test) in the button script, when I click the button (which also hides the menubar), the cursor changes to watch and then back again so fast I almost cannot see the watch at all. I tried adding "set userLevel to 5" in a line prior to that, but it didn't help. As such, even if I do the ResEdit trick, if I cannot even get the cursor to change to be a watch, would it work?

I still have the SuperMac SpeedCard installed. Curious if this is yet another SpeedCard quirk.

I think you can also set the cursor to "none".

You may have to follow the cursor change with a wait since the cursor returns to the selected tool when a script finishes.

 

[retr01]

So, earlier in this thread, @Mu0n showed steps to convert a modern image to a 1-bit image at 512x342 pixels in TIFF format for compact Macs in Photoshop CS2. Here are the steps on how to do that in GIMP. @JDW is famous!

Disclaimer: The 1-bit image looks sharper on the screen on a Mac emulator or on a compact Mac. What you see is only an example.​

 

[Mu0n]

Yep, was about to propose Gimp, which I also use on my work laptop-tablet hybrid.

Let me check how complicated the macpaint and/or tiff file formats are.

 

[retr01]

I learned that there is an IO site that can convert a modern image to Atkinson dithering. It is different than the Floyd-Steinberg dithering via GIMP. One difference I noticed was that the Sad Mac icon was obscured compared to the Floyd-Steinberg dithering, which did not obscure that icon.

 

[Mu0n]

Almost got a version that can open MacPaint files (type 'PNTG'):

although it's not clear if that would be enough for your needs @JDW . You seem attached to the more recent TIFF format...

 

[Mu0n]

a MacPaint file is:

a 512 bytes header;
then packed data that is dealt with the Mac ROM trap UnpackBits and it unpacks into rows of 72 bytes (so 576 b&w 1-bit pixels), which is larger than the screen estate, and up to 720 lines of it (way longer than the 342 lines of the target machine).

I found a nice full screen image to test it with (I think it comes from Jam Session?)

Here's the new sit archive with the built program, source code and 2 test mac paint images.

If you try to open it on a macintosh with a color display, you'll get the 1-bit data spread across a smaller size, repeated in a few different shades. It'll look weird, but you'll recognize the images. This quick utility is meant for 1 color screens (or simply color macs set in 1-bit mode) and I've coded it so it displays the first top left corner 512x342 area of the macpaint data into the whole compact mac screen.

 

[Crutch]

@JDW I just want to flag this one more time in case you haven’t tried it … I tested to confirm, and as I predicted above, you can hide the cursor in HyperCard for as long as you like without any coding.

All you need to do is to put a text field on your card, and type some spaces into it until the blinking insertion point is off the screen.
Here’s how.

* Open a stack with the image you want to display.
* set userlevel to 5
* Select the Field tool
* Under Objects, select “New Field”
* Position the field so that it very small and all the way in the bottom right corner of the screen
* Select the Browse tool
* Hide the menu bar
* Position the mouse cursor in your new field and click
* Press the spacebar a few times to get the blinking insertion point past the edge of the field

The mouse cursor will be hidden as per typical Mac UI behavior when you are entering text. It will remain hidden until you move the mouse.

You could set this up once, save the stack and just paste in a new image when you want to re-use it.

 

[Crutch]

This video shows the approach I described above. (HyperCard 1.2.5 running in Mini vMac emulating a Mac Plus running 6.0.8)

 

[JDW]

This video shows the approach I described above. (HyperCard 1.2.5 running in Mini vMac emulating a Mac Plus running 6.0.8)

View attachment 6949

While watching that video, I felt like Mr. Spock when I exclaimed, "Fascinating!" And it really is.

Folks, I wish to thank all of your for your kind ideas. Because I spent a huge amount of time getting HyperCard v2.3 to work, I stayed with that and just used Canvas 3.5.3 to covert the TIFF files from my modern Mac into MacPaint files which HyperCard can import. I then made buttons to hide and show the menubar. And I advanced to the next card with keyboard arrow keys.

What I do is film myself talking with the Mac off. That eliminates any noise from the computer and gives me clean audio. I then film the Mac switched on and I advance through the graphics, and then in post I crop out everything but the CRT and placed that atop the dark CRT on the footage of me talking. All the graphics then appear at the right time, for the right duration, and you don't see me reaching for the keyboard or looking down at my iPhone monitor to see if the graphics in fact advanced or not.

I will be releasing my new video shortly so you can see what I am talking about in the closing segment.

With that said, I will be revisiting all the suggestions here, especially my @Mu0n, for possible use in future videos. So please know your time wasn't wasted. I appreciate it very much!

 

[retr01]

This topic was fun! I enjoy exploring ways to view images in beautiful B/W patterns that the B/W compact Macs so elegantly displayed, which is fascinating! There is a the related topic of transferring images to a compact B/W Mac back in the day. Check out this thread, MacVision II!

 

[Mu0n]

I will be releasing my new video shortly so you can see what I am talking about in the closing segment.

With that said, I will be revisiting all the suggestions here, especially my @Mu0n, for possible use in future videos. So please know your time wasn't wasted. I appreciate it very much!

I watched the video and it was near the end in your thanks section, mostly (maybe elsewhere as well). So, it seems like you needed something resembling a button activated slide pusher for giving talks, but of course you're activating it in post while still displaying the image as faithfully in the Mac itself to go for quasi maximal authenticity (since these same images could just as easily be displaying in mini-vMac and tied up together in your video editing software and 99.5% of all people wouldn't spot the difference).

I respect that way of doing things - the same mindset applies when I stream a gaming session on Twitch or YouTube using a real Mac Plus feeding its video via a RGBtoHDMI. Only those intimately familiar with the games would detect that the sound or the animation delays aren't natural even if mini-vMac was set to 1x speed.

I'll make a new thread about my utility and go for an official release, put on Mac Garden. I'll make it so both PICT and MacPaint files are supported and I'll have the utility load them automatically from the folder it's in and you'll be able to go from one to the other with the arrow keys. In order to respect the Mac 512 K's limitations, I'll preload only a fixed maximal amount of images and load them on the fly if you attempt to go overboard. Either way it, wouldn't be terribly slow, it'd just spread disk activity one way or the other.

I'll release it on Mac Garden and on my website, maybe itch.io as well, that's where I wanted to target my future utilities and games anyway.

 

[Eric's Edge]

@Crutch
I focused on TIFF because it is more compatible with old and new Macs than even GIF or JPG. MacPaint is best for old Macs, but modern Photoshop doesn't like it. Hence my use of TIFF (no layers, no compression -- just the basics).

I spent a lot of time on the HyperCard solution, so I will likely go with that. But I wish there was a script command for HyperCard v2.3 that could hide the cursor (pointer). I can mostly slide it into a corner, but a few pixels still display.

I got Photoshop v1.1 to work after a fresh install, but again, I probably will use HyperCard this time. Photoshop v1.1 surprised me because not only can it display the images full screen without a menubar, but it can open the TIFF files created on an M1 Mac under MacOS Monterey too. Pretty slick!

On FaceBook, Nathan Andrews mentioned this to me...

TIFFWindow XCMD w/ source : ecognome : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

TIFFWindow is a shareware XCMD that displays TIFF imagefiles in a window under Hypercard. It understands 1, 2, 4, 8,and 24-bit images, as well as compression....

archive.org

But it seems to display TIFF images in a window, rather than full screen, which isn't what I want. However, if HyperCard v2.3 could import TIFF files created by modern Macs directly, without my having to open them in Canvas and resave them first, that would be a time saver. But in the future, I probably will just use Photoshop v1.1 because that can open the files directly and do what I want.

I realize this is an old post but it's an interesting problem. The HyperCard stack could be toggled to display full screen with a key click. I'll poke around and see what I can come up with. Maybe I can incorporate this as an example stack for my course on practical applications.