Lander on the Acorn Archimedes

ActivePlayableBBC Micro

Based on Zarch

Lander on the Acorn Archimedes screenshot

About

Zarch is a 1987 3D game by David Braben made for the Acorn Archimedes's launch; it grew out of an earlier tech demo called Lander, which was bundled with almost every Archimedes machine. This repository is a fully annotated reconstruction of the original 1987 Lander source code for the Acorn Archimedes, rebuilt by hand from a disassembly of the released game binaries rather than written as a new implementation. It supports building both the Arthur and RISC OS 2 variants of the game, and the assembled output is verified byte-for-byte against the original binaries via checksum comparison.

How it differs from the original

A separate BigLander variant, built from the same annotated source with landscape-size code changes, replaces the original's fixed 12-by-10 tile landscape with a configurable one (64-by-64 by default) and runs on later versions of RISC OS beyond the original's Arthur/RISC OS 2 support.

Getting started

The game can be built from source on Windows or on Mac/Linux using the provided build scripts together with the vasm assembler and Python, producing Arthur and RISC OS disc-image folders that can be loaded into an emulator or copied to a real Acorn Archimedes. The source can also be converted to BBC BASIC and assembled directly on Archimedes hardware.

History

The annotated source was reconstructed by Mark Moxon from a disassembly of the original Arthur/RISC OS application-disc release, as a companion to his lander.bbcelite.com site and one of several similar software-archaeology projects he has published for Acorn/BBC-era games, including Elite.

Licensing & legal

The repository carries no license file, so under GitHub's default copyright rules only reading and forking are permitted — no other reuse of the code or commentary is authorized.