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

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]

NEXT

[

https://lander.bbcelite.com/source/all/lander_a.html#landsca...

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/

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...

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).

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.