Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes

https://lander.bbcelite.com/

by ibobev • 2 years ago

168 39 2 years ago

lander.bbcelite.com

unwind2• 2 years ago

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

MarkMoxon3• 2 years ago

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!

unwind2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Direct link to play Lander - https://archi.medes.live/#disc=lander&autoboot

gizajob• 2 years ago

Thanks for the tips – a blast from the past straight back to my School Daze (48K).

DrBazza3• 2 years ago

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.

pasc18782• 2 years ago

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.

billyjobob• 2 years ago

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?

Sophira2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

lproven2• 2 years ago

It always felt like if Acorn had been based in the US, the world would be using Acorn machines.

I agree. But there is a more nuanced take:

RISC OS was amazing. It was a tour de force in the 1980s, predating Windows 3, Apple System 7, OS/2 1.1 (the first version with a GUI), and of course Windows 3.0. But it was very limited in some ways and it still is today. Acorn killed the RISC PC 2 "Phoebe" which could have supported dual CPU SMP -- but Acorn's OS couldn't.

So Acorn would have needed to change OS to a new OS at some point, and if so, the computers wouldn't have been Archimedes any more. They'd have been ARM boxes with other OSes running on them. Some kind of UNIX probably. Then they'd have won.

But this did happen and they did win. ARM boxes running UNIX are everywhere and they are in the pockets of something like 2/3 of the human race, all day every day.

The real missed chances were not for RISC OS everywhere, which was never going to happen. I loved RISC OS but it was doomed. Hand coded ARM assembly for an always-on internet-connected SMP machine was not going to happen.

The 2 real missed chances are other things. That if other OSes had got in first, before UNIX, then they could have won big.

Around the time Acorn was giving up on desktops, BeOS was moving from PowerPC to x86. Imagine if Be, spurned by Apple, did a deal with Acorn instead. A $2500 BeOS desktop workstation with 4 passively-cooled ARM chips, silent and with blisteringly fast smooth multithreading, in 1998 or so, years before Windows 2000?

Or if Be didn't want to play, an ARM-based Amiga with QNX?

But the big missed chance was a whole decade earlier.

Apple built and evaluated an ARM-based Mac called Möbius in the late 1980s.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/where_computing_went_...

It was a possible successor to the Apple IIGS and it ran Apple II and IIGS code, and 68000 MacOS apps too, faster than any of them on real silicon at the time.

If it had the bravery, Apple could have gone directly to ARM from 68000, bypassing its entire PowerPC era and entire Intel era and about 20 years of technological detours.

ilaksh• 2 years ago

Main source seems to be here: https://github.com/markmoxon/archimedes-lander/blob/main/1-s...

DrBazza3• 2 years ago

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...

louthy3• 2 years ago

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).

regularfry2• 2 years ago

The ARM instruction set was a thing of beauty, right through ARM6. Thumb sort of ruined it for me.

louthy3• 2 years ago

The last Acorn machine I wrote anything for was the RISC PC, which I think was ARM6, if I remember right. So, I lucked out: first Archimedes: ARM2, last one: ARM6 then done :D

mellosouls• 2 years ago

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]

[

https://lander.bbcelite.com/source/all/lander_a.html#landsca...

MarkMoxon3• 2 years ago

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.

Sophira2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Oh the envy. The rest of us shlubs on other platforms had to hand assemble and poke it into memory. Ugh.

throwaway48476• 2 years ago

I wish there was an expectation that we get source code for everything at 20 years instead of sometimes at 30 or 40.

timsneath• 2 years ago

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

Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes

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