Glider 4.0 (browser port)

GAME BRIEF

What's the game?

D. Bohdan ported Glider 4.0, John Calhoun's 1991 Macintosh game, from its original THINK Pascal source to TypeScript and rebuilt enough of the Mac's system software to run it: a source port, not an emulator, and no Mac ROM is needed. Every test runs a script of key presses on the original game in an emulated Mac and on the port, and the two must match pixel for pixel and sound tick by tick, so it plays the way the 1991 game did, bugs included. You fly a paper plane from room to room: air from the heat ducts and fans keeps it up, while furniture, flames, bouncing balls and other planes bring it down, and rubber bands, batteries and spare sheets of paper help. The houses, art and sounds of the open-source 4.05 release come with it, and so does the Room Editor for building houses of your own. It starts as a 16-color Mac II; the Options menu switches to a black-and-white Mac Plus or the look of the 1994 Windows version, and adds CRT-style screen filters.

BEFORE YOU PLAY

What to expect

Free, no account and no ads: the page loads only its own files. In Chrome it reached the title screen in under a second after about 1 MB of downloads (about 3 MB of files once unpacked). Unofficial: Glider is John Calhoun's game, and he did not make this port, but he shared it on Bluesky on October 26: "D. Bohdan faithfully ported Glider 4.0 (a Mac game I wrote & released back in 1990) to run in your browser." Saves, houses and preferences stay in your browser; File > Export Files saves a backup. The port says it plays by keyboard, mouse, gamepad or on-screen buttons on a touchscreen; we have not tried it on a phone yet. Switching tabs pauses the game. Open source (MIT) on GitHub.

Controls: Arrow keys: left and right fly, down uses a battery boost, up fires a rubber band; Tab pauses and resumes. Ctrl+S saves (Command+S on a Mac). Configure... in the Options menu changes the keys, and Options > Controls adds Gamepad and an on-screen Virtual Gamepad.