Digital Archaeology: A Comic Revival
How LiveCode can be a vital tool in saving historic data

By Fulvio Massini

Martin Mystère is a comic character originating in Italy 30 years ago; in his adventures Martin is an archaeologist who investigates the big mysteries in mankind’s history. He’s searching for the real origin and meaning of such places as Stonehenge or Nazca and fighting against a sect called “men in black” that doesn’t want mankind to discover the real truth. Since the first issue Martin has been using computers to keep track of his investigations and became a Macintosh user from the very first moment in 1984.

The Beginning

It all started when Sergio Bonelli Editore decided to produce an App dedicated to Martin’s 30th anniversary. Alfredo Castelli, Martin’s creator, asked me

“Look, I still have this, can we use it for something?”

holding out a 3.5 inch floppy disc.

The floppy contained a HyperCard stack that was produced in 1990 and was given as a gift to Martin’s fans. It contained a visual database of all the places he had visited during his investigations. Since then the world has changed: Apple discontinued HyperCard in 1998, switched to totally new CPUs and totally rewrote their operating system. On top of that, production of 3.5 inch disks and floppy readers has been discontinued for some years now.

In computer terms, finding this thing was like stumbling upon a clay tablet written in strange hieroglyph characters, even if it was “only” 22 years old. Two floppy disks occupy the same space as today’s iPhone. Most young iPhone users probably wouldn't even know what a floppy disc was.

Read that stack!

Being a HyperCard developer a long time ago and a LiveCode developer today I had an idea: we could transform that stack into an App for iOS and make it available again to today’s fans. What better opportunity to celebrate Martin’s birthday that with a “digital archaeology” mission?

Even though I knew LiveCode could open and convert HyperCard stacks I had never tried this functionality in practice. But there was another challenge before that: no Mac in the office had a floppy disk reader. Luckily I had an old iMac Bondi Blue at home and I managed to find an external USB floppy reader on eBay (oh the wonder of eBay!). Like magic the old HyperCard stack was now on a brand new USB key and available to today’s computers.

Opening the HyperCard stack with LiveCode was like opening the pages of a book printed at the time of Johan Gutenberg, untouched for centuries; it was like going back to the beginning of computer history. Happily, using LiveCode, almost everything converted correctly and was there to view: scripts, graphics, buttons, cards.... Only some pictures were lost in the conversion. They had been stored in the stack as resources and handled by some XCMDs, but today’s Mac OS X doesn’t allow easy handling of resource forks.

Conversion and restoration

The standard size of a HyperCard stack was 512 x 342 pixels, so it was quite close to the screen of a 3GS iPhone, which is 480 x 320. Expanding the stack to support the larger retina display was unthinkable.

Like in the restoration of a painting or an ancient book we wanted to preserve the original user experience by changing as little as possible: only the necessary things to make the stack usable on iOS and iPhone’s display had to be touched.

Fortunately there was some extra space in the original stack design that allowed us to bring elements closer together to fit into the new smaller iOS display area. HyperCard used 1 bit graphics and pixels had to be moved with extreme precision if you didn’t want to generate moire effects or misalignments. It’s impressive to see what could be achieved with so little: every graphic and every pixel was carefully placed to look perfect in its position, and we wanted to keep that feeling as much as possible.

Click image to zoom

The text itself of course was totally wrong because the original fonts were missing. It was not difficult to bring them back close to the original using today’s fonts. One key issue was readability and we really had to struggle down to the last pixel to keep text readable without making it look too big. Luckily we could use some pixels that in the original stack were used for the vertical scroll bar since it was now replaced by a native iOS scroll controller.

Some interface elements like scroll bars or navigation buttons were not available on iOS or were simply not usable because they were too small. We decided to keep them anyway so that users could still take the challenge to tap a 12 x 12 pixel area, but we had to provide an alternative and more efficient way to navigate around the stack. Going from one card to the next or the previous one was achieved by the swipe gesture, which is quite familiar among iOS users. Popup menus were replace by native iOS pickers, while an icon displaying the face of Martin Mystè̀re originally intended as a help system was still used to display updated help messages guiding users randomly tapping on the screen.

I have to say that it was quite remarkable for me to see a HyperCard stack on my iPhone screen and be able to swipe through the cards!

From the scripting point of view only minor adaptations had to be made: almost everything in Hypercard also worked smoothly in LiveCode.

The intro

Besides the restoration we decided to write a small intro to explain to today’s users what HyperCard was and what we did to bring this stack back to life. Users downloading this app would enter a cumbersome 1 bit black and white world and their reaction could be very negative if they didn't understand its meaning.

So Andrea Artusi and Carlo Velardi, two graphic designers who also worked on the project, came up with a colorful story in which Martin Mystère interacted with Nathan Never (another character from Bonelli) and bring this stack back to life after buying the floppy disk from a computer antiquaire droid. This story is presented to users at the very beginning when they open the stack so they have a chance to learn what HyperCard was and why they find themselves in this 1 bit world. There is also a link to a long interview with Bill Atkinson introducing HyperCard some 25 years ago!

The full and vibrant colors of the intro dissolve to grayscale and finally to 1 bit dithered HyperCard style graphics bringing the user back to the past.

Final considerations

As we put more and more information on digital media it is very important to preserve and bring this information to future generations. One can still read a Bible printed 500 years ago, but it can be extremely difficult to read information that was organized on a floppy disk 20 years ago. We have to update and convert information before it becomes totally unreadable if we want to deliver it to future generations. Otherwise floppy disks, CDs and DVDs will become like cuneiform tablets found in Mesopothamy’s libraries and information recovery will be extremely difficult if not impossible.

In this task LiveCode proved to be not only a very efficient development tool for today’s apps but also a Rosetta Stone that can be used to bring back to life a huge amount of things created with HyperCard.

You can check out the app for yourself here.

About the Author Fulvio Massini is a multimedia developer and designer. He has written many books on HyperCard and multimedia and thinks computers should come closer to humans in usability and programmability. He uses LiveCode to develop many mobile projects.