5 ms·

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/ https://arch

by tirant 2y ago

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/ https://archi.medes.live/

pdjstone 2y ago
Direct link to play Lander - https://archi.medes.live/#disc=lander&autoboot https://archi.medes.live/#disc=lander&autoboot
- gizajob 2y ago
  Thanks for the tips – a blast from the past straight back to my School Daze (48K).
DrBazza 2y ago
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.
- fidotron 2y ago
  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 Essentially they were given the runaround until the product was out of date.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.
- lproven 2y ago
  > 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_wrong_feature_part_3/ 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.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  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.
  - DrBazza 2y ago
    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.
    - pasc1878 2y ago
      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.
      - lproven 2y ago
        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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- billyjobob 2y ago
  > 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?
- Sophira 2y ago
  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.

by tirant 2y ago

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/ https://archi.medes.live/

pdjstone 2y ago

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

gizajob 2y ago
Thanks for the tips – a blast from the past straight back to my School Daze (48K).

DrBazza 2y ago

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.

fidotron 2y ago
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.
lproven 2y ago
> 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_wrong_feature_part_3/ 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.
pasc1878 2y ago
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.
- DrBazza 2y ago
  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.
  - pasc1878 2y ago
    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.
    - lproven 2y ago
      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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
billyjobob 2y ago
> 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?
Sophira 2y ago
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.