May’s Program: Jet Flyer


Stay on course in this ZX81 flight simulator and try not crash.

[Jet Flyer 1984]Jet Flyer is May's Program of the Month. Although a bit late, I believe it is a bit better than last month's and worth a quick try. The goal is to keep your jet on course by using the “Z” and “.” keys to bank right or left. It isn’t an overly hard game. You just need to keep the course indicator close to zero. I won’t say how close to avoid spoiling the fun.

Jet Flyer is one of the few games I created that used actual math to draw the lines. Normally this is because the ZX81 BASIC is very slow when doing a lot of calculations. To speed things up, the program alternates between FAST and SLOW while generating the display. The game plays generally well because of, or in spite of, that.

The program listing was in the worse of conditions. The thermal paper used by the Sinclair printer is sensitive to oils and tends to fade overtime. Although it took longer to enter than normal, I was fortunately able to enter the entire program with only a few errors to correct. If you run into any bugs, please let me know. Although most likely something from the original programming days, it might just be a transcription error.

Sorry for the program being so late this month. I’ve been unusually busy and finding myself traveling a lot. I will also be traveling a lot in June, so don’t expect an update until later in the month. There are plenty of other programs, so feel free to enjoy one of them.

If you want to run this program on your Android phone or tablet you can download a compressed copy of the program to your device. You’ll need to save the .p version of the program to your device to allow Zed Ex (Beta) to run it.



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