There are many icon sets out there, but my goal was to capture icons that were stored within Macintosh applications. I chose the following resources in the hopes of capturing a good set of well-known and obscure vintage Macintosh applications.
Includes MIT licensed code adapted from:
Although I cannot read Japanese, I made an effort to render Japanese characters with the help, in part, from Matt Sephton's blog post on MacJapanese. The free version ChatGPT also provided assistance with code reviews, the special handling of MacRoman and Shift-JIS encoded strings, the PowerShell scripts used for data processing and advanced JavaScript tricks.
With gratitude to the Macintosh Garden, infinitemac.org and to the publishers of the various compilation CD. All icons copyright by their respective artists.
I wrote a tool that opens every resource fork on a volume and extracts any "ICN#", "ICON", "icl4", "icl8" and "cicn" resources it finds. The tool generates a SHA-1 hash of the pixel data of each icon to eliminate duplicate icons and keeps only the unique ones. I then copied the resulting data to my PC and designed several PowerShell scripts to build a data set that could be easily streamed by a web page.