Toys

David Braben’s seminal ARM demo for the Archimedes was a familiar sight at late-80s Acorn shows. Written for Arthur on an ARM1 machine it was, sadly, incompatible with the ARM3 and later OSes, so has slipped from the consciousness. This had to be redressed!

This is a rebuild from the original binary that runs in a window when run from the desktop (but will still full-screen if run from the command line with MODE13 available). It’s a bit more efficient, quite a bit smaller, and I took the opportunity to fix the flag too, but the maths still uses LOG and EXP tables instead of that newfangled MUL.

There is some joy to be had from running multiple copies simultaneously. My 1987 head would have exploded.

Keys:

• Keypad 4 6 2 8 — move the flag around the screen

• Keypad 1 9 – move the flag toward or away from the viewer

• Z X C V , . – rotate around the three axes

• R – reset to initial view

• W – switch the wind on and off

• Esc Q – quit (or just close the window)

The zip also contains the original binary from 1987. Everything in this release continues to be covered by David’s original 1987 copyright, and I relinquish any copyright claim on additional code.

24KB is a small price to pay for a friend who works as hard as you do.