Post #461592
2026-03-01 00:54 UTC
Replies (16)
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 00:54
Originally released as a proof-of-concept HyperCard stack in 2024 and pushed to the limits of what HyperCard could do in 2025, I wanted a program people would actually use - one that didn’t bring older Macs on their knees just sending lines of text - ideally something you left running in the background. This does that, in a program that can consume just 120 KB of RAM. (2/3)
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 02:59
Adding a note on compatibility: this runs in anything with System 7 and up and only requires 384 KB RAM. edit: starting with version 1.0.2, GlobalTalk Chat also works on systems without Color QuickDraw
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 07:41
We're blasting through the updates today fixing the bugs and adding some creature comforts. Compared to 1.0, the current version 1.0.4: • Now supports Macs without Color QuickDraw • Adds tab complete for replying to users • Adds nickname highlight when you have been replied to, including a different alert sound • Fixes issues with: chat log scrolling back to the bottom, incomplete user list, no sound, timestamp display, text going under the scrollbar #GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 18:08
Day 1 is over! It went beyond expectations! After all the crashes, timeouts and corruption I constantly had during development I was expecting once it hit a wider user base to be full of major issues. But as far as I can tell, my debugging paid off, no reported crashes*, and all the timeouts were just due to MacOS typical multitasking fun We also easily smashed the simultaneous user record of the HyperCard version pretty much off the bat, without breaking a sweat! Cumulative counts:
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-02 02:33
Got a crash report on the Mac SE from @scj I've seen the MacsBug crash screen many a time over my life, but at most I just looked at the name of what function crashed. For work I only ever used modern debuggers that show your variable contents inline Now is the first time I'm decoding the registers, deducing what values were in my code at the time of the crash. I used to think "how could a register dump be of use to anyone, it's just random hex” but I'm starting to see thru the Matrix now… 💃
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-05 02:41
New version is out, with optimized scrolling! Especially noticeable on older machines, it now scrolls the chat log cleanly instead of constantly redrawing the whole window. No more annoying white flashes! See the before and after: #GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-12 16:06
People were having out of memory errors and crashes after using the client for 24 hours+ idling and chatting heavily (the default scrollback grows to 500 lines) so for 1.1.8 I’ve fixed a handful of small memory leaks, rewritten some of the data structures to use Handles to help the Mac OS memory manager breathe a bit more, etc. I’ve been running it on my IIcx for nearly 3 days straight now with the minimum memory allocation of 384K and it seems to be holding up fine. #VintageApple
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-18 16:55
When I first laid out this chat window I seriously thought to myself “I need to figure out how to hide the scroll bar in the List Manager since that user list scroll bar will never be needed and is just taking up space”. But here we are with nearly 20 users online! All with no timeouts or any lag. I think with the HyperCard version last year we peaked at like… 5?.. users and it was completely falling apart. #GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh #VintageApple #RetroComputing
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-22 05:43
A behind the scenes snap of the development of GlobalTalk Chat: here are the first messages actually sent over a physical network and not loopback testing on the same machine. (chat log ordering was still backwards at this point) #MARCHintosh
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@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-03-23 03:05
#GlobalTalk Chat 1.1.9.1 fixes a crash on login on 68000 CPUs (Mac SE, Classic, etc). As you may expect, I finally ran into the dreaded unaligned memory access limitation, which the 020 and up don't have It has also been built with AppearanceLib set to weakly imported for PowerPC, so hopefully that removes the system dialog requiring you to install AppearanceLib on PowerPC macs running System 7 (all my other apps have also been silently revved with this build fix if you need them) #MARCHintosh
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@billgoats@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 01:30
@kalleboo Cool!
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@jack68k@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 02:01
@kalleboo wow, I love it ❤️ I'm totally downloading this
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@byteknight@bitbang.social 2026-03-01 02:47
@kalleboo Nice job - it's very speedy now!
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@_the_cloud@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 04:19
@kalleboo Looking forward to trying this. Does it have SpindlerBot? :)
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@fergycool@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 08:05
@kalleboo Super excited to try this out!
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@europlus@social.europlus.zone 2026-03-02 06:21
@kalleboo congratulations, and thank you! I hope I get a chance to play with it!