Oolite Bulletins

For me it was also the floppy drive for the C=64, just I bought Elite already before my Christmas gift (the 1541) arrived and had ample time to peruse the manual, the novella, the poster with the ships and the box's description. What a way to whet my appetite for the game!

Seems like Elite was on every platform but the one we had (the TI-99/4A), but then, we didn't even have a cassette cable for the thing, so unless it had been on ROM cart, we wouldn't have been able to run it anyway. I found Oolite about a year and half ago and it's never left my computer, even switching platforms it came along for the ride .

CommRLock78 wrote:

Seems like Elite was on every platform but the one we had (the TI-99/4A).

I have very fond memories of the TI-99/4A. My best friend had one, even before I got my C64, and many weekends were spent maniacally typing listings from computer magazines into either one of the machines.

Commander McLane wrote:

CommRLock78 wrote:

Seems like Elite was on every platform but the one we had (the TI-99/4A).

I have very fond memories of the TI-99/4A. My best friend had one, even before I got my C64, and many weekends were spent maniacally typing listings from computer magazines into either one of the machines.

That sure sounds like a lot of fun... they were great machines. Actually, the thing was packed away until I posted this and set it up again in the office . I want to learn more assembly on it - and as it's a simple 16-bit microcomputer from the 1970's, I think it will be a highly heuristic experience (and I'd like to see how far I can push the thing ).
But anyway, back to topic, it's too bad that Elite was never ported to the TI (something I'd be highly tempted to do if I had the resources - i.e. some source code). I wonder why it never did make it there - perhaps Texas Instruments' policies regarding third party vendors had something to do with it... .

CommRLock78 wrote:

I wonder why it never did make it there - perhaps Texas Instruments' policies regarding third party vendors had something to do with it... .

I think it's more due to the really tiny amount of RAM that the TI-99/4A was equipped with. For cost reasons it had only 256 bytes(!) of real RAM, used for register "workspaces", while all programs had to be stored in the 16KB video RAM (some of which was needed for actual display purposes, of course; so it wasn't fully available for software).

I played the game on the Acorn Electron. That was a very limited version. Monochrome only. No Suns (fuel scoop was a cargo scoop only), very few ship types (5 in total). No Thargoids!. Planets didn't have the rotating disc/lines. No missions.

You could purchase a Galactic Hyperspace unit/drive (whatever it was call in the game) only if you used it nothing would happen. Given that the memory was restricted but not that restricted that much more that the original BBC A I never saw the reason for that. It was just a rotate of the seed and a find closest system to current location function, after all. This may have been a bug.

I still have my Acorn Electron.

Phantor

PhantorGorth wrote:

I played the game on the Acorn Electron. That was a very limited version. Monochrome only. No Suns (fuel scoop was a cargo scoop only), very few ship types (5 in total). No Thargoids!. Planets didn't have the rotating disc/lines. No missions.

You could purchase a Galactic Hyperspace unit/drive (whatever it was call in the game) only if you used it nothing would happen. Given that the memory was restricted but not that restricted that much more that the original BBC A I never saw the reason for that. It was just a rotate of the seed and a find closest system to current location function, after all. This may have been a bug.

I still have my Acorn Electron.

Phantor

Wikipedia, Elite (game) wrote:

Additionally, the original tape version for the Electron contained a bug that stopped Galactic Hyperspace from working. Acorn provided a mail-in tape-replacement service to upgrade to v1.1 (marked as such on the tape label) that fixed this bug.

You could have gotten a replacement .

CommRLock78 wrote:

Wikipedia, Elite (game) wrote:

Additionally, the original tape version for the Electron contained a bug that stopped Galactic Hyperspace from working. Acorn provided a mail-in tape-replacement service to upgrade to v1.1 (marked as such on the tape label) that fixed this bug.

You could have gotten a replacement .

I never knew at the time and rather irrelevant now I have Oolite

PhantorGorth wrote:

I never knew at the time and rather irrelevant now I have Oolite

Quite .

As I think I've mentioned in another thread, I had Elite on the Amstrad CPC464. It was prone to crashing every once in a while for no reason but on a good day you could get an hour or more with no problems. The only mission I ever found was the nova; I must have left Galaxy 1 far too soon to learn about the constrictor hunt and never got back there. Perhaps the Trumble mission wasn't implemented, and I never found the cloaking device legitimately (there was a very long cheat code printed in the Amstrad magazine that gave it to you - lots of typing and then I'm not sure what else you had to do). Mind you, with that version you could jump into Witchspace and murder Thargoids for the fun of it, as you didn't become visible when you fired.

Way back in '85 I was already 30 when I saw Elite on a friend's C64. It took a long time to load from tape (beautiful colors though). It didn't take long before I got my own C64, mainly to play Elite. How things have changed in those three decades...

I was playing Aviator on a BBC 'B' Torch Unicorn Network station in 1983 (these had an additional 32K RAM and a Z80 second processor) when one of my colleagues (also an Acorn Service engineer at the time) showed me this new game about to be released called Elite from Acornsoft. Given that I was already blown away by what could be achieved by Aviator you can image what my next 6 months involved!

Reached Elite on that version and the ArcElite version on both an A440 and a RiscPc. Not reached Elite in Oolite yet as RL keeps getting in the way. This probably explains why I didn't get married until I was 38

NigelJK wrote:

...I didn't get married until I was 38

Ha, I put it off 'till I was 50

NigelJK wrote:

I was playing Aviator on a BBC 'B' Torch Unicorn Network station in 1983 (these had an additional 32K RAM and a Z80 second processor) when one of my colleagues (also an Acorn Service engineer at the time) showed me this new game about to be released called Elite from Acornsoft. Given that I was already blown away by what could be achieved by Aviator you can image what my next 6 months involved!

Reached Elite on that version and the ArcElite version on both an A440 and a RiscPc. Not reached Elite in Oolite yet as RL keeps getting in the way. This probably explains why I didn't get married until I was 38

Hmm... I think that was the setup that was used when I was at college. I remember a lab with that had about 16 BBC's all linked up. I also proved to the lecturer's that you could do recusion in Basic even though they said it couldn't be done. Wrote a "Tower of Hanoi" program in BBC BASIC for them only to be shot down when they pointed out they meant the original BASIC.

I was introduced to Elite when my parents got an Acorn Electron for Christmas 1984 that came with an Acornsoft pack that included Elite, Sphinx Adventure (I mapped this out in full in a little notebook - not sure if I still have that) and Snapper.

Ahhhhh, Elite! Had some dreams of rotating starfields in those days!