Video Game

StuntCopter-Swift

A classic Mac game, pixel for pixel

StuntCopter is a 1987 game originally for black & white Macintosh computers by the late Duane Blehm. You fly a helicopter over a moving wagon and drop a stuntman into a pile of hay. Don’t land on the driver or the horse!

A few years after etching it into a ceramic tile, I came back to StuntCopter and ported it to run natively on modern MacOS and Windows.

The goal was to change as little as possible:

The game logic is Blehm’s original Pascal source code, translated line by line into Swift. It keeps every procedure name, variable and comment, so the two can be read side by side.
The art, menus and dialogs all come from the original 1987 application. Nothing was redrawn.
The graphics go through a small re-creation of the Mac’s original 1-bit drawing system, and the sound through an emulation of the Macintosh Plus sound hardware.

Compared against the original running in an emulator, the title screen matches pixel for pixel.

There are a few modern additions: the window scales up by whole pixels so it stays crisp, the game pauses when you switch apps, and your high score is now saved between launches.

Blehm’s source code was published by Pete Gamache, who received it from John Calhoun.