Looking for the Hypercosm Player? This is probably the best place to find it. Note that Hypercosm is out of business, this is just an unsupported mirror of the last available versions of the Hypercosm software. For information on what happened to Hypercosm, see my Hypercosm History page.
It was recently pointed out to me that it appears that I'm allowed to redistribute the various Hypercosm tools. The license for Hypercosm Studio 1.3.2 allows any "natural person (not an organization or other entity)" to distribute the binaries under certain conditions. The later releases appear to lack any license, so I gather they use the same one.
Note that I provide no support and this comes with no warrantee. Hypercosm itself provided no warrantee when it still existed.
Here is Hypercosm Studio 1.3.2's license for reference.
Notes
- Some applets contain a bug in their random number generation. This bug is only triggered on modern computers. If the bug is tripped, the random number generation system will always return the same result. Some applets will fail, others will generate unusually consistent results.
Hypercosm Player
Downloads contains standalone player and web browser plugin.
Microsoft Windows
Download HypercosmPlayer2_2_1Windows.exe (1.8 MB)
There is a good chance that the installer will not be able to locate newer web browsers. Once the Hypercosm Player is installed, go to the install location (probably C:\Program Files\Hypercosm\Hypercosm Player), and copy NPAXHyp.dll into your web browser's Plugins directory.
You can uninstall the Hypercosm Player using the standard Windows "Add/Remove Programs" Control Panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Reomve Programs).
Linux
Download HypercosmPlayer2_2Linux.tar.gz (2.5 MB)
The binaries are dynamically linked, so upgrades to various libraries may break things. It works fine on my Red Hat 7.3 box.
Note that the combination of Hypercosm and X-Windows can push your video drivers past their limits and cause your system to crash or hang. Regrettably, many Linux video drivers are unable to handle the accelerated window moving, being scrolled partially out of the parent window, or virtual desktop flipping. While all of this software is used at your own risk, the Linux version is particularlly risky.
To install, unpack the tarball using "tar -xvzf HypercosmPlayer2_2Linux.tar.gz", change into the created directory with "cd hypercosm_install", and run the installer with "sh ./hypercosm-install". If run as root, the installer will try to do a system-wide install, otherwise it will install the program for the current user.
You can uninstall the Hypercosm Player using the "uninstaller" program found in the install location. If you installed for the current user, try "~/.hypercosm/uninstaller*". If you installed system-wide, it will be whereever you specified (probably /opt/hypercosm).
MacOS 9
Chose the file format that you can most easily work with. BIN is recommended.
- Download HypercosmPlayer2_2Mac.bin BIN format (1.7 MB)
- Download HypercosmPlayer2_2Mac.hqx HQX format (2.3 MB)
I have never installed or tested these binaries, I have no idea if they
work. They have certainly never been tested on any release version of MacOS X.
Hypercosm Studio
While a Linux version was released (no Integrated Development Environment, just the compiler), I don't have a copy to share.
Manuals are a problem. The manuals were never distributed as part of the Studio bundle, only seperately, and never under a license that allowed redistribution. You can try to get the manuals from the Internet Archive. Some of the links off that page (the Tutorial and User Guide) work fine. The two key files (the OMAR Language Manual and the System Manual) are truncated and unusuable in most PDF readers.
- Some programs use get_seconds to seed the random number generator. This is a bug, as get_seconds returns the time in seconds since the Hypercosm Player started. On modern computers, this is usually 0. The random number generator cannot use 0, causing all sorts of problems. If you run into such problems, change the call to get_seconds for seeding the random number generator into trunc(get_seconds_since_midnight + 10).