Oolite Bulletins

Had just bought a Powerbook (Hmm, wireless Unix Laptop... lurvely!) and was noodling around on the OS X software site and it was about fifth on Strategy games, at the time (this was Octoberish, two years gone).

Played for a week or so, and liked it. Then I came on here - after having saved and saved my virtual credits, and got myself a Python (back then, one of the major upgrades ships available). I hated it, and wanted to ask if there was anyway of learning to love it. IIRC, Winston suggested piracy, but Aegidian provided the Josher model, shortly thereafter, which was a good compromise of all the features I then desired - surely the ultimate "Green Van Man"'s dream vehicle - the Ford Transit of the skies!

So I was saved from a life of going 'Aaaargh!', all the time, addressing everyone as 'Dutch-built, slab-sided, longshore men... grass combing buggers... and the poxed sons of a parson's fart and no seaman!' or 'splicing me mainbrace'.

FWIW, when I firstcame on here, I was flying a Python, and finding it a bit of a farce, after my trusty Cobra 3, so that is how I came by this rather stupid monicker... I'd no idea I'd still be writing stuff on here, nearly a year an d a half later....

Having been a player of Elite on the Apple II and Amiga, as well as Frontier on Amiga, I was astounded to see a familiar looking screenshot in the Linux Format Christmas issue a few months back.

It had never even occured to me that people may be porting or rewriting these classic games. Thick, huh?

Good old Macworld gave away a copy of v1.06 back in July 2004*. I had been an Elite addict from the days of my trusty Spectrum 48k - I even transferred it onto the 2 x 180k floppy drive I bought for the Speccy some years later. It was wonderful to not wait 7 minutes for it to load, hopefully, then ruin your eyesight trying to do the security gizmo!

Oolite was well playable by then*, and it didn't take long to discover this fabulous emporium and its still growing dedicated band!

Hello! First time poster here. Like Flying Circus, I found the game on the OSX software site, while browsing through the strategy games (when I should have been doing work) - and couldn't believe my luck! Superb stuff.

Anyway, I've been playing for a little while and been reading this site every now and then, looking for game hints and tips, and finally got sucked into these forums, being continually impressed/amused by the folks here.

I remember sitting next to a mate who was playing Elite on a 286 PC, whenever I got a go I just crashed into a space station or got blasted instantly by a smuggler.
Years later I'm a Mac User looking for (and I apologise if I offend anyone here) an X-Wing free demo....and then stumbled across Oolite on the official Apple website. Now ranked 4th in top downloads. I started playing occasionally, but have since been dragged into the universe, fully impressed by the community, especially the coders out there who continue to have imaginative ideas.

I stumbled on Oolite on the Apple OSX software site a little over a year ago. Every six months or so I get this urge to play either some kind of space sim or a D&D-style rpg. Or at least I used to. Now I just play Oolite. And spend far too much time reading posts here.

I was googling for a Linux port of Elite, as I was wont to do once or twice a year, and found aegidian.org. That would've been 1.52, probably - a bastard to make work, but worth every swearword when I finally got that spinning Cobra on the screen

From memory I saw it on a retrogaming website.

I'm a bit of an emu/retro freak

CheshireNoir wrote:

I'm a bit of an emu/retro freak

Who doesn't love Emus? They're also very tasty, although they can disembowel you with a single kick... so treat with extreme caution.

What? Oh. My mistake.

Heh, once tried to catch an escaped and panicking emu (in Belgium, go figure!)
Finally, some crazy fool grabbed it by its neck and successfuly wrenched it to the ground, but those kicking legs, those talons... I thought for a moment it would be the last action I ever saw my father perform.... (Yes, he was that crazy fool )

TedJ wrote:

CheshireNoir wrote:

I'm a bit of an emu/retro freak

Who doesn't love Emus? They're also very tasty, although they can disembowel you with a single kick... so treat with extreme caution.

What? Oh. My mistake.

Bwahaha!

As a fellow Australian I know where you are coming from wrt emus. They make tasty pies as well.

[Slightly off topic I have stopped using the phrase "Aussie" ever since some marketroid @$$ decided that it'd be a good idea to combine it with a battle cry of the extreme right wing skinhead movement. It'd become the "mating call" of the australian yobbo ever since. People were chanting "Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie Oi Oi OI" in the recent race riots. Unsuprisingly these race riots had been largely orchestrated by the Skinheads movement.]

Funny emu story...

A few years back, while driving near my hometown in Tennessee, my girlfriend (now wife) and I saw a billboard along the highway which read "Emus - Alternative to Tobacco". Now obviously, this sign was aimed at the local farmers in an attempt to lure them away from growing the cancer plant. But emus are not exactly a common farm animal here in the U.S. And with the education system in Tennessee being the way it is, my wife commented that there would probably be people reading the billboard and trying to figure out exactly what an emu was, and how to go about smoking one!

Needless to say, "smoking emus" became a running joke with us for the next several years.

And emus are STILL not a common farm animal in Tennessee or anywhere else I'm familiar with.

Bob

Oddly enough there's a couple of emu farms here in Kentucky (just up the road from Tennessee). Given the mentality of some of Kentuckians, I wouldn't be surprised if someone here has tried to smoke one.

And they are quite tasty. Make for a good burger. (I'm also an Australian - surprising number of them on this bb).

Well you're all displaced Brits anyway

TGHC wrote:

Well you're all displaced Brits anyway

Now, now, let's not get into all that. It's well documented history that you Brits deported all the rugged, handsome and intelligent types in favor of keeping the pasty inbred upper crust.