A command line tool that reads a HyperCard stack and generates a folder with XML and PBM files from it containing a more easily readable representation of its contents. Based on Tyler Vano's and Rebecca Bettencourt's code from http://creysoft.com/xtalk/

There's an Xcode project that creates a command line tool that you can point at a HyperCard stack and it'll extract all the information in it into a folder of image files, XML files and sound files.

The code for converting 'snd ' resources (sampled sound) to AIFF files currently requires QuickTime, meaning this tool will only compile on a Mac, and only for 32 bit CPUs (The 32-bit tool will run fine on a 64-bit Mac, of course).

If you are trying to build it on a platform other than Mac, change the MAC_CODE define in CStackFile.h to 0 and take all the .cpp files and .h files and compile them into a command line tool named 'stackimport'. For full functionality, you'll also have to write code to replace the Mac-specific code (which extracts resources from the resource fork of the stack and converts 'snd ' resources to AIFF -- the resource-fork-reading code in https://github.com/uliwitness/reclassicfication may be a good starting point).

For example, on GNU/Linux-based systems such as Debian, the following has been known to work:

g++ -o stackimport woba.cpp Tests.cpp picture.cpp main.cpp CStackFile.cpp CBuf.cpp byteutils.cpp -std=gnu++11

Once you have built the stackimport command line tool, just use it. Syntax is

stackimport [--dumprawblocks] [--nostatus] [--noprogress] <originalStackPath>

where originalStackPath is the HyperCard stack you want to convert.

Where the options are:

dumprawblocks - Create files containing the raw data from each block in the stack, don't just create the clear-text output. This is useful if you want to extract some information this program doesn't yet recognize. It'd be appreciated if you could contribute any additional knowledge you have about HyperCard's file format back to the authors of this.

nostatus - Don't output status messages while converting the file. These are mostly useful if you are displaying a progress UI, or if conversion aborts and you need to know what bock caused the error.

noprogress - Do not show 'Progress 1 of 5' etc. messages. These messages are useful for updating the progress bar in a progress UI.

Copyright (c) 2005,2006 and 2010 Rebecca Bettencourt, Uli Kusterer (Mr. Z)

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