Modern day xTalk (HyperCard)

OXTPaul

New Tinkerer
Nov 12, 2021
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Hello all, just wanted to let people know about the OpenXTalk project.
xTalk is the commonly used name for the family of Scripting Languages / Development Environments loosely based on HyperCard.

There have been many clones / derivatives of HyperCard over the decades including SuperCard (the first commercial clone, which is still available on up to macOS 10.14), Gain Momentum (later called RadBuilder), HyperSense (SenseTalk on NeXT, now called eggplant), Oracle Media Objects (MediaTalk), and a bunch of others.

One of those others was a UNIX HC clone originally called MetaCard, which became cross-platform later.
In the 2000s MetaCard changed hands and became Runtime Revolution (RunRev) and then renamed to LiveCode.
OpenXTalk is a fork of the now-legacy LiveCode Community Edition code-base.
LC Ltd. has dropped all support for open-source, but a some of us are hoping to keep it alive as a fork (OXT).

I'm a huge fan of HyperCard since 1987 so this is the perfect project for me to devote myself to.
If you know HyperCard / HyperTalk then you should be able to start using OXT right away (as I did around 2014)
Obviously going to be some differences, but they're great differences! For one thing there's a whole xTalk-like (albeit lower level programming) middle-ware language called Builder for adding foreign code libraries and GUI widgets, greatly expanding the possibilities! The IDE runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux and can compile your stacks into standalone apps that run on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5 (WebASM) and has a GUI-less command line versions that can be used for web CGI instead of Perl.

We could really use some help, really need help with compiling the engines for different platforms from C++ code (particularly need to build for Apple Silicon, Rapberry Pi / ARM, and a FreeBSD build would be cool too), and generally cleaning up the repo to make it easier to build with simple Make files would be great! There's lots to do! I'm looking at wrapping the Linux build into a portable AppImage right now.

Growing the regular user-base would be great too!
If you want to port some ancient HyperCard Stacks into this century, or just want to be able to build some tools quickly...
this is the way ;)

Check it out and join the fun:
forums.openxtalk.org
 
Last edited:

Eric's Edge

Tinkerer
Oct 31, 2021
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I'm interested enough to take a look. I've recently written a quick little game in HyperCard. Could be interesting to try a port.
 
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OXTPaul

New Tinkerer
Nov 12, 2021
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I'm interested enough to take a look. I've recently written a quick little game in HyperCard. Could be interesting to try a port.
Excellent, come on by if you need help with conversion from HC -> LCC / OXT.
There's an old but in-depth article about that here:
Here is the standard HC icons converted: http://livecodeshare.runrev.com/stack/582/RevLibHyperCard-Icons