PILOT by Bill Longley from ZX Computing June/July 1983 Take control of an aeroplane on its last approach to the runway in this program written for us by Bill Longley of Colchester. All you have to do in this game for your ZX Spectrum is to land your 'plane on the runway. However, it's not quite as easy as it sounds! Your task is to centre yourself East to West, then lower your altitude and cut down the speed of the 'plane. Next, you must put down your undercarriage and, hopefully, land your aircraft. Don't worry if you're not successful at your first few attempts at landing - it often takes many turns before you score any points at all, let alone land the 'plane! To control your 'plane, you use the '5' and '8' keys to move West and East respectively. A negative number on the control panel means that you are travelling West of the centre of the runway, and a positive number means you are too far over to the East. In the air tonight You lower your altitude using the '7' key and you can gain height by pressing the '6' key. To land the aircraft, you must lower your altitude to 100 metres or so, reduce your speed and, when your South reading on the control panel is low enough, land. Your airspeed can be altered using the 'S' key to slow down and the 'F' key to accelerate. Once you have landed, you should use the air brakes to quickly cut your speed - this is done by pressing the 'B' key. You can only put down your undercarriage when your altitude is less than 1,000 metres. The 'W' or 'D' keys will lower the under- carriage. It is more important that you should have a low airspeed than to be dead centre of the runway, but you must remember that if your speed goes below 100 km/hr then your engines will stall and the inevitable will probably happen. All of the controls you'll need will be shown to you when you begin the game, and a number of messages appear throughout the game informing you of your status in the air. The program uses all but 1K of the 16K available and includes quite sophisticated graphics. If you go too far off course you will see some mountains looming onto the screen; should you get too close to the ground, you'll see a forest; and if you complete your mission, you'll get a look at the runway. This last view is almost three- dimensional! -- NOTE: There was a machine code fragment printed in line 0 of the listing. As this wasn't referenced in the program I haven't included it there, but here it is for the curious (it calculates the space between STKEND and RAMTOP): 0 REM *e\ RESTORE MOVE *SIN \CODE GO SUB R RESTORE STR$ <> which translates to: LD HL,(23653) ; STKEND PUSH HL POP DE LD HL,(23730) ; RAMTOP XOR A SBC HL,DE PUSH HL POP BC RET [JimG]