So when was your First Encounter (fnarr, fnarr) of Elite

Matt2001 · Post by **Matt2001** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 6:38 pm

Thanks for the warm welcome Cmd. Cheyd, it's a pleasure to be here.

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:22 pm

Welcome Matt2001!

_ds_ wrote:
C****** bread-boxes were for the (shall we say) seriously misguided. A Hognose missionary who I bumped into a while ago asked me to pass this on to you lot, unfortunate enough to own these excuses for computers: "REPENT! REPENT! REPENT!"

Tsk! Tsk! The PC/Mac discussion of it's time. I still own and love my two working C64s. Not sure what was misguided about owning such a fine machine - I even enjoyed PEEKing and POKEing my way through its innards.

From memory:

Code: Select all

10 rem change border to black
20 POKE 53280,0
30 rem change screen to black
40 POKE 53281,0
50 rem change text colour to white
60 POKE 646,1

What could be simpler!

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:19 pm

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Tsk! Tsk! The PC/Mac discussion of it's time. I still own and love my two working C64s. Not sure what was misguided about owning such a fine machine - I even enjoyed PEEKing and POKEing my way through its innards.

It was really a nice machine...especially for learning BASIC! Not that this would be a good language, but I cannot remember any machine since then where it was possible to write a tron-racing game which uses two joysticks in 18 lines of code! It also was pretty simple to add computer players and special options with just a few more lines...thus it was the machine which got me hooked to writing programs...

Next was an Atari ST which had been modified with soldering rod to support a 16 MHz cached processor and 4 Megabytes of RAM. I had to use a saw on it's case in order to move the keyboard away from the machine as the processor would not fit below the keyboard, but then few people had wire-linked keyboards

I also was able to write a wire-frame modelling utility and did re-create all those elite-ships with it

I then had a 486-33 MHz and never really did write programs on it...turned out that I had to switch to a PowerMac with 60MHz (sped up to 80 by adding a different speed controlling chip - the last time I had to use a soldering rod on a computer!) and C++, but then it was fun, especially since C++ is so much nicer than BASIC. At the university, we created our own 3d-multiuser environment on such machines, with full scale images as textures running on our own hand-written 3d code. Definitely much fun!

Screet

_ds_ · Post by **_ds_** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:49 pm

DaddyHoggy wrote:
From memory:
Code: Select all
10 rem change border to black
20 POKE 53280,0
30 rem change screen to black
40 POKE 53281,0
50 rem change text colour to white
60 POKE 646,1
What could be simpler!

A decent BASIC?

Code: Select all

  10 BORDER 0
  20 PAPER 0
  30 INK 7
  40 REM Extra bits, "just in case"
  40 FLASH 0
  50 BRIGHT 0
  60 OVER 0
  70 INVERSE 0

… oh, you wanted POKEs? The first half from memory, the second half I needed to check:

Code: Select all

  10 REM Set border to black with white ink
  20 POKE 23624,7: OUT 254,0
  30 Set text area similarly
  40 POKE 23693,7
  50 REM Clear PAPER/INK/BRIGHT/FLASH 8 (inherit)
  60 POKE 23694,0
  70 REM Clear PAPER/INK 9 (contrast), INVERSE and OVER
  80 POKE 23697,0

The screen will need to be cleared too, but that's trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.

Now, a good BASIC – that'd be BBC BASIC.

Matt2001 · Post by **Matt2001** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:56 pm

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Welcome Matt2001!

Ta very muchly Daddy!

Cmd. Cheyd · Post by **Cmd. Cheyd** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 12:02 am

SYS64738

(System address for the reset button on the side of the C64)

_ds_ · Post by **_ds_** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 12:03 am

Screet wrote:
[The C64] was really a nice machine...especially for learning BASIC!

POKE, POKE, POKE, POKE, POKE, GOTO? I must disagree!

Screet wrote:
Not that this would be a good language, but I cannot remember any machine since then where it was possible to write a tron-racing game which uses two joysticks in 18 lines of code!

Should be possible on any BBC B or BBC Master.

Spectrum, BBC, BBC Master, Spectrum +3, A3010, Risc PC (upgraded to StrongARM), various PCs (some of which are laptops) ranging from 486SX25 via a few older Pentiums to Athlon 64 and Atom N270. Oh, and a Z88 which I picked up on a charity stall at a show…

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 12:04 am

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:
SYS64738

(System address for the reset button on the side of the C64)

Ain't it strange that those numbers got so burned in to our minds? Today I had a conversation about this topic when I tried to explain to some people working with a medical system who had to look up numbers because "noone can remember all those things". It appears to me that todays software sometimes seem to come from people who were working with such numbering schemes so much that they never thought about "normals" not being that way.

Screet

_ds_ · Post by **_ds_** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 12:06 am

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:
SYS64738

RANDOMIZE USR 0
PRINT USR 0
PAUSE USR 0
etc. I think that you get the idea

Oh yes, forgot this one, though it's not quite the same (who remembers it, and for which OS?):
CALL !-4

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 3:34 am

Screet wrote:

that they never thought about "normals" not being that way.

Screet

Call me a paddy wagon and lock me up then.

Xenoox · Post by **Xenoox** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 10:29 pm

Hi All.

The computer was a C128, in C64 mode, back in about 1985. I bought it to play Flight Simulator, as I couldn't afford a real PC, but I spent most of my time playing Elite. After a particularly bad pirate fight, I'd love to relax to the tune of 2001 as my docking computer took me in. About 6 mo ago I gut a bee up my behind about Elite. All I saw was Amiga emulators. A couple of weeks ago I decided to go ahead and attemt the Amiga emulator route. Luckily, I saw some vid on utube and there was mention of Oolite. I thank my lucky stars for that! I played for a week using cursor control. That's not bad if you avoid fights and only trade. I picked up a cheap joystick last weekend that that makes all the difference. As I'm no longer eating, I expect I'll start losing weight.

Cheers!

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 6:34 am

Welcome to the board!

Xenoox wrote:
I played for a week using cursor control. That's not bad if you avoid fights and only trade. I picked up a cheap joystick last weekend that that makes all the difference. As I'm no longer eating, I expect I'll start losing weight.

Cursor control...IEK! I know you are not the only one, but I tried that only for a short time and could not imagine playing that way. Especially the modern joysticks have much better capabilities than those of the C64/Atari/Amiga time...

About that other report: maybe we should make some YAH ad (in-game fun advertising system) like "Get slim fast: Play Oolite!"

Screet

KZ9999 · Post by **KZ9999** » Sun Mar 22, 2009 3:36 am

I echo the Screet's hello to you Xenoox, welcome to one of the nicest BBS's on the interweb.

Keyboard flight control isn't that bad. I cut my teeth on the elk'Elite using the keyboard. The trick is to use a series of light taps instead of holding down the keys like a game-pad button. That's one of the reasons why we have the roll and pitch indicators, to provide feedback on the 'degree of pressure' you are applying to the controls. I've been finding some good results with the mouse flight control* too. It's not as fine grained as a joystick and take time to get the feel, but if you hate the keyboard, give it go.

I second an YAH 'Oolite Weight-loss' ad. The number of times I've look up and realised 'frell, I've been playing for 6 hours, no wonder I'm starving.'

* If you don't know, use [shift][M] while in full screen mode to switch it on/off.

Xenoox · Post by **Xenoox** » Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:32 pm

Maybe they make an YAH ad for adult diapers too.
I don't want to get up when I'm playing and the empty
soda can just isn't cutting it.

Thanks for the welcome.

overmage · Post by **overmage** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 3:40 pm

Interestingly enough my first encounter with an Elite derivative was with an old Palm VE. There was this Palm-top device craze going on back when i was in junior high, and everybody was playing this game where you bought a ship and bought goods from one planet, flew to another, shot down enemies along the way, sold the goods for a profit, bought more goods and flew back to sell more, then bought bigger weapons and shields for yourself... sound familiar anyone?

Everybody was competing to see who got an Iron Ass first (though we didn't know that was the name back then), which was basically a kitted out ship with two shield enhancements and four fully upgraded lasers! So then I stumbled upon this game on the web called Elite, and the rest is history.

<-- was still an embryo when the original Elite was released D:

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So when was your First Encounter (fnarr, fnarr) of Elite

I first encountered Elite (or one of its derivitives) on a...