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Lander on the Acorn Archimedes

Acknowledgements

On this page you can find information on copyright, as well as the people whose work has made this project possible.

Copyright notices
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The following copyright notices apply to the contents of this site and the accompanying repositories.

  • Lander was written by David Braben and is copyright © D.J.Braben 1987.
  • The commentary is copyright © Mark Moxon. Any misunderstandings or mistakes in the documentation are entirely my fault.

The code on this site has been reconstructed from a disassembly of the original game binaries from the Arthur and RISC OS application discs.

A big thank you to the following
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Huge thanks are due to the following, without whom this project would simply not exist:

  • David Braben, not only for writing Lander, but for Acornsoft Elite and Elite: Dangerous, both of which I unconditionally adore
  • Kieran Connell for his BeebAsm version of Elite, which inspired me to start my journey into game disassembly, and provided the building blocks for the build process I use in my repositories

You can find out more in the about this project page.

Also, thank you to everyone who has written in with comments, and particularly these kind souls who spotted things that I missed or explained things I didn't understand:

  • Charles Ferguson for pointing out that OS_Byte #113 returns the old bank number in R1, which completely transformed my (previously incorrect) analysis of the bank-switching process in SwitchScreenBank routine. Thanks Charles.
  • David Sharp for fixing up the code for !BigLander so that it works on all versions of RISC OS and StrongARM (see this post for details). Thanks David.
  • Stardot user NickLuvsRetro for spotting an error in the commentary for the clipped part of the triangle routine. Thanks Nick.

A note on licences, copyright etc.
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This site and the accompanying repositories are not provided with a licence, and there is intentionally no LICENSE file provided in the repositories.

According to GitHub's licensing documentation, this means that "the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work".

The reason for this is that my commentary is intertwined with the original Lander game code, and the original game code is copyright. The whole site is therefore covered by default copyright law, to ensure that this copyright is respected.

Under GitHub's rules, you have the right to read and fork the repositories... but that's it. No other use is permitted, I'm afraid.

My hope is that the educational and non-profit intentions of this repository will enable it to stay hosted and available, but the original copyright holders do have the right to ask for it to be taken down, in which case I will comply without hesitation. I do hope, though, that along with the various other disassemblies and commentaries of Acornsoft's games for the BBC Micro, it will remain viable.