Show HN: Glider 4.0 Unofficial Web Edition (Mac game port)

dbohdan.github.io

45 points by networked 3 days ago

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

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.

devindotcom - 2 days ago

just noticed the name. thanks very much for many hours of fun in my youth. I'm looking forward to playing this again!
networked - a day ago

Thanks! Glider 4.0 was one of my favorite games growing up. Hearing this made my day.

daviewales - 2 days ago

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.)

networked - a day ago

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.
- networked - 11 hours ago
  
  John Calhoun confirmed in a DM he didn't collaborate on the Flash game. He also pointed out there was an NES homebrew:
  https://web.archive.org/web/20140327053629/http://www.retrou...
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDy82TKaJp0

devindotcom - 2 days ago

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.

statico - 2 days ago

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.

networked - a day ago

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.
- statico - 12 hours ago
  
  I dug up the project and posted it: https://mac.statico.io/ - click the "How it Works" header to read how Claude decided to make it work. Everything is on GitHub.
  Still getting sound working, but I hope to have that done shortly.
  - networked - 7 hours ago
    
    Neat. Shufflepuck Café has sound and seems to be fully playable. Its one problem is that Executor doesn't capture the cursor, so a rapid mouse movement causes the cursor to leave the screen and stop moving the paddle.
    If you want to add more games, consider The Yukon Trail. Thanks to the magic of bootleg CD-ROMs, it's the Trail game I had as a child in Europe. It is probably weaker than Oregon, but it's worth a playthrough. Collections generally ignore it in favor of the more famous sibling.

joelkesler - 2 days ago

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

networked - a day ago

Thanks. Please check again; it should be fixed.

trueno - 2 days ago

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.

krosaen - 2 days ago

This makes me very happy - one of the first games I played on my mac classic.

platevoltage - 2 days ago

Man, I used to play the crap out of this game. Amazing.