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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Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#32There’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/
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.
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 Essentially they were given the runaround until the product was out of date.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.
Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#33Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
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.
Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#35Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#36One 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...
Oh the envy. The rest of us shlubs on other platforms had to hand assemble and poke it into memory. Ugh.
Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#38Happy 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, ug…
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
Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#39There’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/
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.
> 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.
Re: Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.