Jeroen Vermeulen has turned his gaze upon another title in the Code the Classics Volume II tome, and successfully brought it to RISC OS. This time the game is Leading Edge, a racing game inspired by the classic Pole Position.
The objective of the game is quite simple: Race against the other drivers, and try to achieve as good a finishing position and time as possible. You start off the race in last position, and you’ll have to weave away around the other cars to pass them while trying to keep your vehicle under control and on the undulating and twisting track. Collisions – with other cars and anything off the side of the track – will cost you time.
The game’s controls are simple – from the keyboard you can use the arrow keys to move left and right, and Z and X to accelerate and decelerate respectively, or a simple SNES-like controller can be used. The latter will need to be plugged in before starting the game, and you’ll need to run a supplied Obey file to enable it.
You can play Leading Edge either in full-screen mode, or on the desktop, and there are options to change the quality of the graphics – and therefore the game’s performance, which might improve it on some systems.
Written in Python, the game needs Python 3.8 and Pygame 1.9.6, and has been tested on RPCEmu, a Raspberry Pi 2, and a Raspberry Pi 4 – all running RISC OS 5.30/5.31, though it should run on other RISC OS 5 systems.
You can download Leading Edge from !Store.