Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes | Hacker News Reader

Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes

lander.bbcelite.com

168 pointsibobev39 comments

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

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!

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. :)

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.

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. ;-)

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...

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.

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!

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

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/

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, Excel was the Mac-to-PC port. Word was already native on the Mac very early on, and that line ended with Word 5.1A, which to many people -- including me -- is the classic Macintosh version. PowerPoint too, but that was acquired: it's not an MS in-house project.

Word for Windows 6 is the point where the Mac and PC codebases converged. And, FWIW, it did so by porting the Windows version to a MacOS Windows-like component library, and Mac users hated it.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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...

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).

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

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

Depends which model you had, I think. The 1994 model had the ARM610, updated to the ARM710 in 1995. I'd forgotten that the ARM7 series implemented two different instruction sets, though. The ARM710 had the same instruction set as the ARM610, with ARM7TDMI coming along slightly later.

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.

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.

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).

...E-Type...

(who's up next?)

Chocks Away anyone?

Loved Chocks Away!

+ Nevryon (rip off of R-Type)

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!

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

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.

> 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.

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