Lander was the flagship game for the Acorn Archimedes, itself the flagship hardware for the then-revolutionary ARM processor architecture. Coded by David Braben, co-creator of Elite, it was brilliant but extremely difficult. Something about it now evokes for me that amazing UK computing era when Commodore and Atari were cooking yet obviously cooked1, though in fairness it was a maybe a few years before that point. 3D fast enough to toy with but barely fast enough to play with. The source code, fully-documented, is available for our perusal. [via Hacker News]
Lander was the very first game to be released for the ARM processor, and it is both a milestone and a masterpiece.
My hope is that this site will be useful for those who want to learn more about Lander and what makes it tick. It is provided on an educational and non-profit basis, with the aim of helping people appreciate the second classic game from this legend of 3D coding (the first classic being Elite, of course).
Note that the code on this site is not David Braben's original source code, as that hasn't been released. Instead, it is a fully buildable source that's been lovingly reconstructed from a disassembly of the original game binaries, and which produces 100% identical game files. All of the variable and routine names are my own invention, but the code itself matches the original source.
Make the view distance infinite and fix the controls. No other improvements necessary!
1. The game was ported by Braben to the Amiga and ST, where optimizations brought it close to the frame rate of the Archie's2.
2. The term "Acorn Archie" now results exclusively in Sonic the Hedgehog art. That sort of fan art, too, right there on page 1 of those lone and level sands.
