Glider, Mac Classic game, open-sourced
github.com
github.com
Spending my nights and weekend (as a high school student in 1992-1996) in my grandparents basement, other kids out playing, I learned pascal, c++, mpw on a Mac SE30, then an LC III.
Fun Fact: I worked an entire Summer to save the $400 that was needed for Metrowerks Codewarrior. To find out that I could have gotten it for $99 academic pricing. To bad I did not know it existed. Mac Mall magazine never mentioned academic pricing! I still have this box set and can't bring myself to throw it out.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I just knew I needed a good "compiler" to make "programs". Apple's IDE (MPW?) was really horrendous by comparison - I was unable to get anywhere with it.
I also literally learned how to write C in CodeWarrior. I wish I could find the CodeWarrior people and tell them how influential it was.
I remember sitting there trying to decide if we should try to figure out this weird C stuff or Pascal first. We ended up going with C. Probably a good choice, in retrospect.
It's hard to tell how much of it's "first love" nostalgia, but I remember codewarrior as being very simple, very fast, and very well designed.
Visual Studio and autotools were both quite a shock. (I still can't believe people use the autotools shit-chain. Ungodly terrible.)
No one cared about GNU until they started selling the SDKs
https://www.google.com/search?q=metrowerks+codewarrior+t-shi...
Those boxes still look like new and occasionally I do a trip down memory lane skimming through the manuals.
My first exposure to the Glider series (and the most major one in terms of hours spent on the game) was through the Windows 3.x port of Glider 4.0. It made exemplary use of the operating system's standard 16-color palette — one of the things that got me to appreciate the higher-resolution-but-limited-palette-and-animation, "desktop computer-style" pixel graphics. What was a major disappointment was that it came without the house editor that would allow you to create your own levels.
I wonder if John Calhoun owns the rights to that version. I would love to see the source code for it released. If it was compiled with Borland Pascal (or rewritten in C — who knows?) it would likely be the better starting point for porting Glider 4.0 to modern operating systems.
And hey, it taught me the concept of a thermal upcurrent. So it's almost educational software, right?
http://macintoshgarden.org/games/glider-312 (very early black and white version) http://macintoshgarden.org/games/glider-40 http://macintoshgarden.org/games/glider-pro
I really wish Rosetta was kept around by Apple.
Sure, you'd have to deal with endian-ness differences everywhere... or used to, when PPC was still a thing
Not "big" and "dramatic", but slightly magical. Perhaps all the more for its subdued presentation.
P.S. Plenty of monsters and whatnot, about. But a paper airplane? Smile.
I guess, in good part, it was the magic of a perfect whimsy.
He actually had the source code to Glider Pro printed and bound into a hardcover book. That way, he said, even if all of his electronic media became unreadable, the code would still live on.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamemechanicsllc/crysta...
I also loved Mission Starlight.
Do you know of a playable/emulatable binary of this anywhere?
I do recall the network configuration to be a bit finicky, so its possible that we spent about as much time setting it up as we did playing.
The read me files are quite enjoyable.
Seriously, to this day, I haven't had an experience that quite lives up to Bolo between friends on an AppleTalk network. It is the 1 game that "Windows people" I know who have played, wish existed on Windows.
* In-game map changes. You could create your own walls, moats, mines, create rubble, etc. in game, so everything was very dynamic, especially once you had several players going.
* (mostly) limited resources. Trees were required to build walls and boats, but there wasn't an unlimited number of them. Even after they were all used up, more would grow ( although if you had some around they would grow more often). Bullets/mines were also limited; you had to go back to base to refill, and you could also use up the base's resources if you were too aggressive.
* Easy to learn/difficult to master. Bolo had just about the right balance for this.
* Headless network play. No server was required (a matchup server existed, but not required); any particular player rage quitting didn't end the game for the rest.
* Bug factor. Not quite sure how this phenomenon works, but like the bugs in the oddly popular Goat Simulator there were a few glitches in Bolo that you could take advantage of - without cheating - for a (slight) advantage.
Not aware of any games in the last 30 years that have a similar balance.
I would have figured that something comparable/inspired by it would have come along by now
Bolo vid 1 showing Windows version with some strategy action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5K0qTh-Vmk
Bolo vid 2 showing loading it up on Mac and playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz_gYZ5kMvc
There really (weirdly) has not been anything like it since. It was like the ultimate tank game with resource management and worldbuilding (like 2d Minecraft-like) elements
It's popularity was severely hobbled by the fact that it was a $25 copy of shareware.
My dad was the first to beat the game. It was such an incredible experience. After mastering that tricky bit with the drop and the basketball, the rooms got easier, the house slowly became empty, you saw the thunderstorm outside, then the glider started to move in a rocking fashion, and then there was the open window, and the ending animation with the glider, free at last, gliding into the dark...
What a game. Thanks John Calhoun!
1. Get OS X running.
2. Find a copy of Metrowerks Codewarrior for Mac OS (the .mcp files are Metrowerks Codewarrior projects) or create a project yourself.
3. Find the necessary header files for the Carbon API (Codewarrior should have them, they're also included with XCode, Apple's IDE).
4. Hope the code is conforming to a current version of the C Standard, so you can compile it without errors. Otherwise fix the errors.
Then you should be able to run it on OS X.
Panarena 2: "R 78.4%, C 21.0%, C++ 0.6%"
Glypha III: "R 92.1%, C 7.9%"
Glider Pro: "R 92.6%, C 7.3%, Objective-C 0.1%"
GitHub, these are called legacy Mac OS codebases. Today you learn a new thing!
I think that answers your question.
The code would necessarily be a full rewrite. All this would be good for would maybe be official asset sources... but then I've seen other people mention that they've reimplemented the game by just taking screenshots, so maybe not.
Glider Pro is written in C (.c files), Glider 4 in Pascal (.p files). Github gets confused by the resource files, which are data files in a specific format used by Mac OS Classic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork
That being said, it's a 20 year old game and works just fine under some of the better simulators (aka Basilisk and Sheepshaver - both of which work well in Linux).
More colors! More environments (you could glide outdoors)! With the ability to create levels you could extend the game play even further. I remember some excellent fan-made levels that provided hours of entertainment.
PC: As it uses a Mac OS specific API a lot I think it would be easier to rewrite it. You would also have to convert the graphics and sounds from their native Mac OS formats to e.g. png and ogg.
iOS: Same as for PC. The Carbon API isn't available on iOS.
Great memories