A lot of people my age that touched Macintoshes in the nineties know that game, Glider, written by John Calhoun. I recently started wanting to try and program a game for the Apple II as it is something I never attempted before, and I wanted to see if I got good enough at 6502 assembly for that. After a difficult start, I managed to have the project take off (pun intended) and decided to make a Glider reimplementation for the Apple II.
I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed developing it!
Glider for Apple II is now freely downloadable:
Download the Glider for Apple II floppy image
Download the Bulgarian version of Glider for Apple II
If you find issues, please report them on the issue tracker!
Glider for Apple II requires an Apple ][+ or more recent; on the Apple ][+, a Mouse Card and mouse are required to play. On more recent computers of the Apple II line, the mouse is optional and Glider can be controlled either by mouse or keyboard. Glider for Apple II is best enjoyed on a monochrome screen. This is a design choice.
If you’re interested in some technical details about my first 6502 game’s development, I have put up a Glider for Apple II development log article.
Oldies but Goodies ! Merci
This is so cool. Can’t wait to check it out!
Downloaded! Fun game. Thanks again. Frank
Awesome! Thank you for using my drawing in the game : )
Also, great job with the other graphics that aren’t from the official Glider games. The sun room is beautiful. And I love the harmless sleeping cats.
I just played through it on actual hardware and had a good time.
Hi Japhy! Thanks for the drawing and the kind feedback :-)
I like how flicker-free and smooth the glider is, pretty impressive that you can do it all during a VBlank.
Nice work, I loved the original Glider game on the Mac. I also made a Glider clone back in 1997 using ASCII art to run on Unix terminals that I then ported to Android as well. https://github.com/waynepiekarski/android-glider
Neat! Perhaps you’ll port this over to the Commander X64?
I’m pretty sure John will be delighted to see this.
Really cool and plays well in Mame but only with the keyboard. If a mouse is in slot 1 it doesn’t function very well. The mouse won’t move the glider to the right more than a little bit.
I’m not sure what the problem would be, I have no issue in MAME. You have to keep moving the mouse for the plane to keep moving, is this what you’re doing ?
I just realized the issue is that Mame “wraps” the emulated mouse around for both X and Y positions, so in a game like Glider where there is no mouse cursor, I cannot tell that I’ve moved the mouse too far to the right and it has wrapped back to the left, so it makes the glider move back to the left. Real hardware would be unaffected of course. How do you overcome this in Mame?
I’m unsure. I don’t think I’ve seen that with MAME 0.271. The most annoying thing is it stops tracking the mouse when the cursor gets out of the window.
I find MAME’s mouse to be closer to my IIc real mouse when I set sensitivity to 80 instead of 40.
But mostly when testing under emulation I play with the keyboard.
Colin! This is awesome. Are you okay if I add this as a “new release” in the apple2ts emulator? https://apple2ts.com/?color=green#glider
Yes, sure!
By the way I tried with apple2ts but couldn’t make the keyboard work ?
Yeah, I had a bug in the emulator where it assumed that the code would always trigger $C000 before doing a $C010 keyboard strobe clear. The Glider code cleverly just looks at $C010 to get the keystroke, which is perfectly legal for the Apple IIe. I had to fix my emulator to match the hardware behavior, which also fixed the Glider keyboard. In short, it should work now, but let me know if you see any other issues!