[HN Gopher] Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn...
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Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
Author : ibobev
Score : 150 points
Date : 2024-09-24 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lander.bbcelite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lander.bbcelite.com)
| unwind wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, "Lander" is only a demo, the actual game
| is "Zarch" [1]. Later ported to the Amiga, and renamed "Virus"
| (which is the title I knew, having grown up on the Amiga).
|
| Very impressive, and cool to read the ARM assembly since it looks
| similar today of course. :)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch
| MarkMoxon wrote:
| I've always felt that calling Lander a "demo" was harsh. It's a
| fully featured game in itself, and has features that Zarch
| doesn't (such as falling rocks and hover mode). Yes, Zarch was
| the result of continued development of Lander, but Lander
| stands on its own, and to me, that makes it a game in its own
| right, not a demo.
|
| It's also a lot more relaxing to play. There's nothing more
| chill than flying over the bucolic landscape of Lander - no
| aliens or viruses in this version!
| unwind wrote:
| Thanks! My memories of "Virus" was that it was super-mega-
| difficult, but of course it was the late 80s and games were
| not afraid of having a bit of a learning curve to them. :)
| amiga386 wrote:
| It's a demo because Braben called it one!
|
| It's technically a game; there's no win condition but there
| is lose condition (3 lives) and a scoring system.
|
| But I don't think most people play it as a game (aiming to
| get a new hiscore), they play it as a toy, slowly become more
| adept at the controls and meander the landscape, the points
| don't matter.
| MarkMoxon wrote:
| OK, I guess if Braben says it's a demo, then it's a demo -
| fair point!
|
| I still think it's a harsh term, especially when Lander has
| features that Zarch doesn't, and a really different
| atmosphere.
|
| Ah well, me and Lander will be hovering here in the corner,
| throwing rocks at Zarch and all its fancy features. ;-)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Was completely obsessed with this game on the school computers.
| Had an Amiga at home but never knew it had a port till like 10
| years later.
| scrumper wrote:
| Same here, we loved it at school. Also a liquid simulator
| called "Aliquid" has just popped into my memory. Hours of fun.
|
| Despite playing hours and hours of Elite on the school BBCs
| before we got a room full of Archimedes machines, I've only
| just today noticed that Lander was also made by David Braben.
| WWWWH wrote:
| I also wasted a lot of my youth playing Elite, so much fun.
| Check out the page--it also has annotated source code for
| Elite (a few different versions up there).
| flir wrote:
| ...E-Type...
|
| (who's up next?)
| Lio wrote:
| Chocks Away anyone?
| louthy wrote:
| Loved Chocks Away!
|
| + Nevryon (rip off of R-Type)
| mattbee wrote:
| I genuinely think that is the best Archimedes-only game,
| just pure arcade fun with split screen dogfights. Such an
| amazing technical grounding. In 1990!
| dave-f wrote:
| Great game, I seem to remember you could play two player
| using a serial cable, and my friend brought his
| Archimedes around, we spent literally all night playing
| it
| mattkevan wrote:
| Oh man, that brings back memories. I had a four pack of
| games from The Fourth Dimension - Cataclysm, Apocalypse,
| Chocks Away and E-Type.
|
| They were pretty much the only games we actually bought,
| rather than just demos from cover disks, so I played the
| absolute heck out of them.
|
| Even after many hours of flying time, I could never stick
| the landings in Chocks Away.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Same here, we loved it at school. Also a liquid simulator
| called "Aliquid"
|
| We had that too, think our copy was just called 'Water'.
| Spent a lot of my teenage coding experimenting trying to
| recreate that, but none of the engines I had access to were
| suitable for the task as they didn't have direct pixel
| access. Wasn't till I learnt Processing way later that I
| managed to replicate it.
|
| Wish I'd shared my replication around more because this was a
| good 8 or so years before the "falling sand game" genre got
| memetic.
| tirant wrote:
| There's an online emulator for the Lander on the Acorn. Not
| easily playable in a phone due to the control scheme though.
|
| https://archi.medes.live/
| pdjstone wrote:
| Direct link to play Lander -
| https://archi.medes.live/#disc=lander&autoboot
| gizajob wrote:
| Thanks for the tips - a blast from the past straight back to
| my School Daze (48K).
| DrBazza wrote:
| To be honest, it wasn't easily playable on the Arch as Lander
| or Zarch.
|
| Remarkable game for its time, as was the machine. It always
| felt like if Acorn had been based in the US, the world would be
| using Acorn machines. Instead, based out the UK it was hard to
| get economies of scale to mass produce and ship world wide.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| No the PC would still win as it has Office and other tools.
|
| Yes Archimedes probably would beat Amiga(which Commodore
| messed up), Atari .
|
| Apple Macs would also exist as they had Pagemaker and the
| Apple Laserwriter. These were out before the Archimedes.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Back when the Arch came out with a full desktop
| environment, the typical PC was MS or DR DOS with TUI based
| WordPerfect. The full GUI Impression word processor was
| released in 1989, about the same time as the first version
| of Word for Windows, but was much, much, better (having
| used both side-by-side when I was a school kid). Also, RISC
| OS didn't BSOD.
|
| But, anyway, it's all might-have-beens.
|
| My point, really, is that any business in the US has a
| massive head-start because of economies of scale. States
| the size of European countries, less punitive taxes, and a
| single language for almost 400m make for a large market.
| It's just a shame Acorn wasn't based there.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Word for windows was a port from Mac which was earlier.
|
| However my point was that IBM PC had won by 1986 - all
| business used that. Anything else was hobbyists only
| except Macs for publishing.
| billyjobob wrote:
| > if Acorn had been based in the US, the world would be using
| Acorn machines
|
| Is not ARM (the Acorn Risc Machine) the most popular type of
| machine in the world currently?
| Sophira wrote:
| Part of the reason for this is the way it used the position
| of the mouse pointer as reference for which direction the
| ship should be pointing, but hid the mouse pointer while
| playing, which concealed the fact that it was using the mouse
| pointer in this way.
|
| A simple modification to the code to show the mouse pointer
| on screen makes it far easier to survive since it's easy to
| re-center the mouse.
| fidotron wrote:
| There was some revealing commentary on this by (iirc) Chris
| Curry at the national computing museum.
|
| Acorn had tried to get the BBC Micro launched in the US but
| quickly learned the regulations in place turn into de facto
| protectionism when it suits them. Essentially they were given
| the runaround until the product was out of date.
|
| In UK tech circles I believe more was learned from episodes
| like that (and Quantel) which led to the later developments.
| For example, ARM prioritized Japan heavily even during the
| Japanese downturn. That generation has largely stopped
| working, and a side effect was they never made as much money
| as their US equivalents would have done.
|
| The problems afflicting the UK, Canada, Japan and even S
| Korea all stem from this. You cannot do business with the US
| long term without the US thinking it is winning all the time,
| and that converts all close US allies into at least appearing
| like states in decline.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Main source seems to be here:
| https://github.com/markmoxon/archimedes-lander/blob/main/1-s...
| DrBazza wrote:
| He's annotated all the Elite source code as well, and even
| fixed some flickering many decades after the original was
| released.
|
| (edit) https://github.com/markmoxon/cassette-elite-
| beebasm?tab=read...
| louthy wrote:
| Happy days of flying the Lander ship straight into the landscape
| again, and again! :D
|
| I got an Acorn Archimedes after my first computer (BBC Micro) and
| was utterly blown away by the elegance of the ARM instruction
| set. I remember being quite disgusted when I got my first job
| developing an engine for the Playstation 1 and had to optimise it
| for the MIPS R3000. There was none of the ARM elegance there. It
| was, well, ugly!
|
| I'm still yet to see any assembler that's quite so elegant
| (although my low level coding days are thankfully long behind
| me).
| regularfry wrote:
| The ARM instruction set was a thing of beauty, right through
| ARM6. Thumb sort of ruined it for me.
| mellosouls wrote:
| One of the coolest things about BBC BASIC was the ability to slot
| inline assembly, and (I think?) reference the same variables in
| both modes as in the code on the op site.
|
| [BASIC]
|
| FOR I% = 1 TO (TILES_Z - 1) / 2
|
| [
|
| [ASSEMBLY] OPT pass% EQUB &E3,
| TILES_X \ Tile row data (even) EQUB &E4,
| TILES_X \ Tile row data (odd)
|
| ]
|
| [BASIC AGAIN]
|
| NEXT
|
| [
|
| https://lander.bbcelite.com/source/all/lander_a.html#landsca...
| MarkMoxon wrote:
| I love the BASIC assembler on the BBC Micro and Archimedes. It
| is a work of art.
|
| Incidentally, the fully buildable Lander source code in the
| website's accompanying git repository is also in BBC BASIC
| format - as an attempt to imagine what the original source
| might have looked like.
|
| A Python script converts it to vasm-compatible format for
| compiling, but you can also build it on a real Archimedes if
| you want to. See
| https://lander.bbcelite.com/about_site/building_lander.html for
| details.
| Sophira wrote:
| To clarify for anyone else reading this: BBC BASIC had an
| assembler built in so that you could write in-line assembly
| language to be assembled at a given memory location, and the
| source is in the format used by the inline assembler.
|
| It doesn't mean there's a port of the game written completely
| in BASIC!
| eschneider wrote:
| Oh the envy. The rest of us shlubs on other platforms had to
| hand assemble and poke it into memory. Ugh.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| I wish there was an expectation that we get source code for
| everything at 20 years instead of sometimes at 30 or 40.
| timsneath wrote:
| This is an incredible labor of love and historical record. The
| technical articles alone have a depth that goes further than the
| documentation for any living project that I know of. I can only
| imagine how much work has gone into this. He gives a talk on his
| disassembly work here, which deserves a wider audience:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orP_0aQo-Pc
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(page generated 2024-09-24 23:00 UTC)