HyperCard visual effects too slow

[uliwitness]

Hi,

just wondering if anyone knows why HyperCard's visual effects (transition effects from one page to the next) don't work in SheepShaver? My guess is they use some low-level tricks or at least assembly language to achieve decent performance, and that somehow passes by whatever SheepShaver uses to detect if the display changed?

ISTR the visual effects working (but being very slow) on Windows, and just being missing on MacOS X.

If you're curious, to reproduce it, get HyperCard 2.4, choose "File" > "New Stack", save the stack somewhere on your hard disk, choose "Objects" > "New Button", then double-click the button, click "Script" and type in

Code: Select all

on mouseUp
  visual effect dissolve to black
  visual effect dissolve
  go this card
end mouseUp

close the window and save, choose the little "hand" icon from the "Tools" menu, then click the button. You should see the screen fade to black by adding random black pixels, then fade back to the button again, in about a second's time.

[Korkman]

Hi,

I'm in the same boat. Hoping to find a fix or workaround for a decade, but haven't found any yet. This only affects the Windows build, though. The transitions are fine for the Mac OS X build. Not sure about the Linux build, will compile soon. If it works fine on the Linux build, I would propose running SheepShaver within VirtualBox or a similar VM.

[Korkman]

Yep, as expected, transitions are fine on Linux builds as well. So this is a Windows only thing. The only workaround I can think of for now is to run SheepShaver in a Linux VM, which isn't as bad as it sounds.

[Yakkers]

I'm sorry to bump this, but I wanted to add my comments and maybe bring some eyes back on it.

I'm on windows and never had this bug until semi-recently, unfortunately I can't pinpoint exactly where it changed for me so I would assume it was after updating at some point but I can't be certain. If others have been experiencing this for years and years though, there must be some other variable at play. This makes it impossible to play Cosmic Osmo so I would love to figure out a solution or help find a fix. I've tried every combination of display and memory settings and nothing seems to affect it.

[adespoton]

Does it happen in all display modes?

https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/sheepshaver_setup

window/full screen
Window refresh rate
Quickdraw accel on/off

And does it happen with JIT enabled/disabled?

https://github.com/kanjitalk755/macemu/ ... indows.cpp lists the Windows-specific prefs options.

Looking at that, it could be one of the SDL prefs at play, or windowmode, or screenmode.