It's a demo because Braben called it one!

It's technically a game; there's no win condition but there is lose condition (3 lives) and a scoring system.

But I don't think most people play it as a game (aiming to get a new hiscore), they play it as a toy, slowly become more adept at the controls and meander the landscape, the points don't matter.

Thanks! My memories of "Virus" was that it was super-mega-difficult, but of course it was the late 80s and games were not afraid of having a bit of a learning curve to them. :)

To clarify for anyone else reading this: BBC BASIC had an assembler built in so that you could write in-line assembly language to be assembled at a given memory location, and the source is in the format used by the inline assembler.

It doesn't mean there's a port of the game written completely in BASIC!

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 Essentially they were given the runaround until the product was out of date.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.

> 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?

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.

> 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_...

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.

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.

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

The last Acorn machine I wrote anything for was the RISC PC, which I think was ARM6, if I remember right. So, I lucked out: first Archimedes: ARM2, last one: ARM6 then done :D

> Same here, we loved it at school. Also a liquid simulator called "Aliquid"

We had that too, think our copy was just called ‘Water’. Spent a lot of my teenage coding experimenting trying to recreate that, but none of the engines I had access to were suitable for the task as they didn’t have direct pixel access. Wasn’t till I learnt Processing way later that I managed to replicate it.

Wish I’d shared my replication around more because this was a good 8 or so years before the “falling sand game” genre got memetic.

I also wasted a lot of my youth playing Elite, so much fun. Check out the page--it also has annotated source code for Elite (a few different versions up there).