In my previous post in this series, I described some ancient software that I wrote years ago that I would like to recycle for the web. This post focuses on massaging the existing resources so that they are web-ready. Boring, but critical, and not so easy, as it turned out!
Preparing the graphical assets:
The most obvious way that suggests itself to implement the puzzles on the web is to create a JQuery UI draggable div with a background graphic. We have a conversion to do. In Hypercard, assets are resources embedded in the runnable file (which was always a huge source of problems.)
To make things worse, my resources were embedded in a proprietary format created by a third party extension. The backdrops are split out separately, in the old fashioned PICT format. Everything is exactly the right size to sync up but nothing is the correct format. Redrawing all this stuff is not an option; however, there are plenty format converters. Getting the resources ready to move to the web is a two-part process:
- Extracting the resources
- Converting the resources to an up to date format.
