StarQLider

A first-person wireframe hovercraft raid for the Sinclair QL.

Fly a fragile hover-glider over a flat, artificial world. Hunt down the white crystals that launch the enemy gliders, destroy every one of them, and warp to the next sector before your shield gives out.

• Destroy every white crystal in the sector. They launch red gliders to defend them: darts that charge, wedges that circle and strafe, kites that stand off and fire bursts.
• From sector 2 on, the crystals fire at you too, from further than your guns reach: attack them on the move, slide across their line of fire, and use the towers as cover.
• Eight sectors, each adding something new that its card names: the crystals fire back, gunships, a minefield, armoured crystals, the swarm, sharpshooters, a fortress. Then they come round again, harder, for as long as you last.
• Your shield refills at each warp. Bumps, mines and enemy fire wear it down; at zero the windshield cracks and you lose one of your three craft.
• The craft drifts: its velocity lags the heading, so turning at speed slides you sideways.

Running it

The download, starqlider-1.0.zip, holds:

• starqlider.qlpak for Q-emuLator (Windows, Mac): open it and it boots the game on a 128K QL at the original speed.
• starqlider.mdv, a Microdrive image for a real QL, a vDriveQL, the ZX Spectrum Next or MiSTer QL cores, or another emulator: put it in mdv1 and boot.

The game takes the whole machine over: reset it to quit. It plays at the same speed whatever the frame rate, so a faster machine (a Gold Card, an emulator at full speed) should run it smoother.

Known issues

• Enemy gliders fly through obstacles and through each other.
• On the MiSTer QL core the wireframes flicker: a core bug, reported upstream.
• The high score is not saved: the game runs without the QL's operating system.

Source

MIT licence. The 68000 source, the tools that build it and the design notes are on GitHub: https://github.com/tomconte/ql

StarQLider is written from scratch in 68000 assembly for a stock QL: a 68008 at 7.5 MHz, 128K and the 512 x 256 mode 4 screen. It takes the whole machine over, draws every frame's wireframes into one screen while showing the other, and reads the keyboard straight from the QL's

It was developed for the Sinclair QL session of Retro Programmers United for Obscure Systems (RPUFOS), Halloween 2026: https://itch.io/jam/rpufos-sinclair-ql.

Co-authored with Claude (Claude Code), which wrote code, tools, the generated tables (meshes, font, sparks, crack, sectors) and some of the texts.