Freeware Game

These days I take my backup strategy pretty seriously (locally to an external drive and encrypted on the cloud using Backblaze). This wasn’t the case in the late nineteens - I lost my entire data on several occasions. Luckily for me, my friend, Pavel Stessin was more vigilant, and held on to a copy of much of my programming work.

I was going over some of this old data recently when I came upon a game I developed in 1998. The documentation said that it was licensed as freeware. Sadly, this has never been released into the wild. This probably has something to do with the following gem I found in one of the files Pavel sent me at the time:

I have copied you only small part of the files, because it would be too big to send by modem.

Alas, the source code for the game did not survive.

I created the splash screen graphics in POV-Ray. The code, as far as I recall, was written in a mix of C and x86 assembly.

Click here to download lander.zip

In order to run the game, you should install DOSBox, unzip the contents to a directory on your machine, and mount it within DOSBox:

MOUNT C ~/LANDER
C:
CD LANDER
LANDER.EXE

Press ENTER to continue when it’s ready and to advance after the splash-screen.

Enjoy!