Welcome to the Glider 4 wiki!
These are the original Pascal sources for Glider 4.0 written by John Calhoun and published by Casady & Green, Inc.
The files and projects here represent a Macintosh software development workflow from over two decades ago! Good luck with the THINK Pascal project files, the resource files, sounds, artwork, etc. Perhaps someone with some file format skills can make something out of them.
Otherwise, the sources are all here (in glorious Pascal) for reference. For those running old Macintosh emulators, a number of house files for Glider 4.0 are included here as well.
16 colors! The entire palette for Glider is the default 16-color palette on the early color Macintoshs. I made heavy use of dithering to get more shades or green, brown, etc. from that small palette. (Still, it is a little garish in places).
I laugh when I see some of the rooms. I realized some time ago that the houses/rooms reflected where I was living at the time — what I was doing. Cracked walls, exposed pipes, milk crates as furniture ... that would be the college ghetto where I was living when I wrote the first versions of Glider. Take a look at the latest versions of Glider for Mac OS (and iOS) to see how my tastes have changed (okay, the milk crate stayed in the game for nostalgia but come on, the boom box from Glider PRO is now swapped for a nice tube amp!).
The origins of Glider go back to a little demo-thing I experimented with on the Commodore 64 (of all machines). Using fairly simple graphics, I created a little program in BASIC in which there was just a vent on the floor and a paper glider. You could make the glider move left and right — over the vent it would rise, otherwise it would fall to the floor. As simple as it was there was something amusing about it.
My first Mac was a Macintosh Plus— years later when I was in college. Wow, what find memories I have of that machine. (Well, I actually still have it in storage — who knows if it boots.) With the educational discount, the price was about $1000, I believe. I had a student loan, I think, and the computer was a justifiable purchase since I would end up doing all my college papers on it.
Having no idea how to program the Mac, I took an introductory programming class at the university — it happened to be a Pascal class. Furthermore, a professor was selling his copy of Borland Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh (original disks with manual) for like $40 (I saw the ad in the school paper). I remember riding my bike to his place to buy the language disks. When I got them back home and inserted the disks it was like, "Okay, now what? How to do make an app with this thing?"
My first experiments programming were little apps inspired by articles from the "Computer Recreations" column in Scientific American (wow, what a great run that column had). Not long after when I began trying to write games on the Mac, I remembered the little paper airplane demo. Obviously that became the black and white shareware game, Glider. I did a few other shareware games but Glider seemed to be the most popular.
Some years later when I was wrapping up my degree, I called Casady & Greene, a software publisher based in California, and just asked them if they would publish a future incarnation of Glider. Sure, they said, but it needs to be in color and have a bigger "house". They even "comped" me my first color Macintosh (a Mac IIsi) so that I could write it in color.
After Glider was released, Casady and Greene asked Gregg Bieser to port Glider to Windows. I have never seen the sources for his port. It was faithfully ported however. If you look around the web you should be able to find the binary to download.
The oddest port has to be the port to Nintendo that Brian Parker did. Odd because the Nintendo was already ancient history by the time he did it. There are still developers that enjoy coding for old game systems. A link to a play-through on YouTube is in the sidebar.
