A couple of us were talking idly in the lab the other day and we got to the subject of old computers and how the C64 WAS better than the spectrum when one wag said elite was better on the speccy, citing the C64's achilles heel, its inabilty to handle the wireframe graphics. He was wrong of course, but this drove me to try and find an emulator version of elite for my pc. Anyway, I happened upon the oolite website and have been hooked since. What a game, I am on average at the moment and trying to persuade some of my colleagues to stop beign so grown up and play the damn thing.
Sorry to ramble I just wanted to say this is great and I still can not believe it was free.
Yeah, you'll find loads of us here that originally played Elite A LONG TIME AGO; personally, on the Speccy, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than the C64 at the time!
We're all hooked too, one Giles Williams has a lot to answer for!!!!
...no, seriously(?), he has done an ace job in producing Oolite, it's what Elite looked like inside our heads!
P.S.
great avatar!
P.P.S
...this isn't the same lab that one R.P.G. a.k.a Mad Dan Eccles used to work...?
The trouble with the C64 for this sort of game was it was a 6510 running at 1MHz whereas the Spectrum used a Z80 at 3.5MHz, though I lost many, many hours playing this superb version regardless.
I never played the Spectrum version but I hear it was a sod to get past the "Lenslok" copy protection before you could even start.
....aaarrrrgggghhhh... ...I'd ALMOST forgotten the Lenslok!
Nightmare. Period. Nothing more to be said... ...BUT... ...the person that invented that should be taken out and sensitive parts of their anatomy removed with a blunt knife...
Some years later, as soon as one was available, I fitted an external floppy drive(all of 80kB!), with a shadow ROM, and copied the game onto a disk... ...sigh... what a relief!
Well, I have had many a heated discussion with spectrum owners over the years and I have not yet heard of the price argument, which of course is quite right, the speccy was a lot cheaper than the C64.
My first experience of elite was on my mate's speccy and I can remember him coming to grief on the lenslok more often than not. Bonkers.
I can't take any credit for the avatar, its the monkey out of family guy.
As for this dan eccles character, I have never met him, but I think I know people who have.....