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Oct 27 16:33 UTC

Show HN: Glider 4.0 Unofficial Web Edition (Mac game port) (dbohdan.github.io)

45 points|by networked||13 comments|Read full story on dbohdan.github.io
https://github.com/dbohdan/glider

https://bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3myrs2ngq...

Comments (13)

13 shown
  1. 1. JKCalhoun||context
    This is very cool.

    It is the only port (that I am aware of) that brings over the additional Room Editor app that allowed you to create and edit "house" (game) files.

  2. 2. devindotcom||context
    just noticed the name. thanks very much for many hours of fun in my youth. I'm looking forward to playing this again!
  3. 3. networked||context
    Thanks! Glider 4.0 was one of my favorite games growing up. Hearing this made my day.
  4. 4. devindotcom||context
    Ah, the muscle memory comes back fast.

    >The port was directed by a human, implemented by Claude Opus 5.5, and designed by both.

    This is certainly one area where I find AI tools to be largely beneficial. There are so many pieces of near-forgotten software that are difficult to interface with at all, let alone to decompile, debug and port and so on. I was thinking lately how useful an AI-powered editor for NES- and SNES-era games would be. The existing tile and mapper editors are generally pretty clunky IIRC.

  5. 5. krosaen||context
    This makes me very happy - one of the first games I played on my mac classic.
  6. 6. joelkesler||context
    Sweet!

    Small Bug: on mobile safari, it zooms in on the page when I click the buttons in quick succession, which makes playing a bit more difficult

  7. 7. networked||context
    Thanks. Please check again; it should be fixed.
  8. 8. daviewales||context
    Related: Aerofoil is an updated port of Glider Pro: https://github.com/elasota/Aerofoil

    Additional binaries are available here (Win, Mac, Android): https://galeforcegames.itch.io/aerofoil

    And a Linux Flatpak version is coming soon... https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/10703

    And yes, it includes the Room Editor! (For those who care, it's also human-created from the original source code.)

  9. 9. networked||context
    Good reminder to play Aerofoil. I starred the repository a while ago and forgot about it. By chance, I never played that much Glider PRO, which I know is the more popular game with more houses.

    I liked the Flash version of Glider PRO made by Mark Arenz in 2006, which the developer put on GitHub a few years ago (without source): https://github.com/markarenz/rid-flash-archive. Worth a try to see how close it got as a 2000s Flash game. Wikipedia used to say this:

    > In 2006, Mark Arenz teamed up with Calhoun to construct a version of Glider PRO built in Adobe Flash.[citation needed]

    I wonder if it's true.

  10. 10. platevoltage||context
    Man, I used to play the crap out of this game. Amazing.
  11. 11. trueno||context
    i had to have been like 3 years old when i played this game. didnt even know it had a name. just seeing it visually made me realize i still have memories there, i literally wouldve never thought of it again for the rest of my life if it wasn't for this wow.
  12. 12. statico||context
    This is awesome. We can now run classic Mac applications as single page apps by emulating the Toolbox instead of the entire OS and emulating 68K & PowerPC with Wasm.

    I started to do this with https://github.com/jpivarski/executor-mac68k-emulator and Emscripten (with Claude driving) and got SimCity 2000 running as a single-page app with sound.

    Then I found https://systemless.org/ which is a similar project.

    Still, super cool.

  13. 13. networked||context
    Thank you.

    That's an interesting fork. If it runs SimCity 2000 already, you could set up a page that lets one try it (with user-supplied game files). You can do the same thing as my project: set the GitHub Pages source to GitHub Actions and create a workflow for Pages (https://github.com/dbohdan/glider/blob/b4d14cfd52873c0378995...).

    I didn't know about Systemless. I know Classic Mac fans to share it with.