[HN Gopher] ResEdit Reference (1995) [pdf]
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ResEdit Reference (1995) [pdf]
Author : tobr
Score : 29 points
Date : 2020-10-08 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.apple.com)
| dtgriscom wrote:
| I loved ResEdit. I especially loved its decompiler; with it you
| could view the source of any application, and even patch it in
| place.
|
| I was so proud the day I took a text editor desk accessory,
| designed for good ol' Mac Plus 512x384 screens, and removed the
| window size limitation so I could have big windows on my
| humungous 1024x768 display.
| rezmason wrote:
| As an early Macintosh tool, ResEdit's UI was intuitive enough for
| non-programmers to pick it up and apply superficial changes to
| the images, sounds, UI layouts, strings and level save files of
| the Mac apps of their time.
|
| Nowadays I can't even swap out the icon file of a Mac app without
| it running aground on the notarization stuff in modern versions
| of the OS. The age of ResEdit is as dead as a dogcow.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And before I found ResEdit the software package I used came
| with a tool called "RMaker". You fed it a .r text file with a
| very terse format for describing the various resources and it
| generated the resource (.rsrc) file.
|
| I even edited 'icon' resources in .r files ... maybe some kind
| of array of hex values? Christ, that was tedious.
|
| And then I found ResEdit....
|
| (At least in my foggy memory that is how I remember things.)
| mwcremer wrote:
| Tedious indeed, but for a long time it was the only game in
| town.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor.
| ..
| jfk13 wrote:
| > as dead as a dogcow
|
| Thank you for the simile -- so much more apt than a dodo, in
| this case!
| janci wrote:
| The world was simpler then. Bitmap fonts, palette-based sprites,
| absolute dialog layouts, simple numeric IDs - much easier than
| TrueType, vecror graphics, responsive layout, uuids of today.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| At the same time, precursor to Interface Builder.
| jawngee wrote:
| Interface Builder already existed in 1995, it was originally
| released in 1988.
| matheist wrote:
| ResEdit was my gateway to reverse engineering, at age maybe 13 or
| so. I first used it to change icons, add keyboard shortcuts to
| menu items, and so on. This taught me that the internals of
| software applications weren't just magic but actually were
| reducible to the 1's and 0's they were made of.
|
| I didn't know how to extend this discovery to the actual behavior
| of applications until I encountered an upgrade named "Super
| ResEdit" which provided a disassembly tool.
|
| That showed a mysterious pair of columns with words like "ADD"
| and "MUL" and "BRA" and "BEQ" and so on in the first column, with
| some hex in the second column. What do those things mean? Hmm, if
| I hover over "BRA" and "BEQ" I get a little arrow pointing to a
| different line, and "BEQ" always follows a line like "CMP"...
| aha, "BRA" means "branch" and "CMP" means "compare" and "BEQ"
| means "branch if equal".
|
| And the second column is some hex numbers which are always
| corresponding in the same way to the first column. If I change
| the second column, the first column changes to match!
|
| And that's how child-me learned to search for
| "check_registration_code" and change the "BEQ" at the end to
| "BRA".
| duskwuff wrote:
| The ResEdit CODE editor was wonderful. It's a pity there was no
| real equivalent for PowerPC PEF executables. (There were some
| third-party tools like Fragmalyzer, but they were harder to
| come by.)
| samgranieri wrote:
| This was one of my favorite tools to use in junior high. I was a
| smartass and changed the menubars and dialog boxes to indicate
| there was a virus on the machine. I got a stern talking to from
| the principal and undid all of it.
| doomlaser wrote:
| ResEdit was a cool tool. I especially liked its built-in pixel
| editor. I remember my first "hacking" experiences as a kid
| replacing sprites in Ambrosia Software games.
|
| Tangent: there was a more feature-packed resource fork editor
| called Resorcerer, which I thought was clever and used as naming
| inspiration for my system-wide cursor hider tool, Cursorcerer:
| http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Same, the Escape Velocity games (and my desire to mod them)
| were some of my earliest introductions to "hacking" or
| "programming" and getting an understanding of how things
| actually worked on a computer. There is a Kickstarter for a
| Remaster of EV: Override,
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| And one of the more interesting parts of that, Cosmic
| Frontier is aiming for data file and plugin compatibility
| with the old resource fork files (alongside an updated format
| for anyone making new plugins).
|
| There's a blog post from last year (before it was
| kickstarted) discussing some of the file format stuff:
|
| https://opennova.blog/2019/09/23/plugin-plans-in-kestrel/
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| >I remember my first "hacking" experiences as a kid replacing
| sprites in Ambrosia Software games.
|
| Similar story here. I tweaked just about everything ResEdit
| could open and show graphical resources for. Netscape, IE,
| PangeaSoft games, random shareware games, the system itself,
| you name it.
|
| Seeing my edits in "live" software was a blast. It inspired a
| certain curiosity and made a little bit of how software works
| click in my head much earlier on than it would have otherwise.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I was 8 or 9 when I discovered ResEdit. Didn't understand most of
| it. But I was able to do absolutely ludicrous modifications to my
| favourite games such as Escape Velocity. Definitely a defining
| moment in my growth.
| StillBored wrote:
| ResEdit, ahhh, of all the fun ways to get in trouble in school.
|
| ResEdit became one of the banned programs. If you were caught
| with it, you were immediately assumed guilty of changing the mac
| stop hands, to middle fingers, and various other juvenile
| activities.
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(page generated 2020-10-08 23:01 UTC)