Oolite Bulletins

Elite running on my SX-64 during the 2015 Classic Computing in Thionville/France. The 1701 monitor is exactly the one I already had when I spent countless hours playing Elite in the 1980s!

Poetry in motion, assuredly. yet......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr2vXDLK7wk

The tech is nothing; without the will of those from whom it draws a cord. These works marked a note that resonated for decades,

The tune has (for some) run out of key. But the first note, is still pure and it's purity still draws a crowd by it's clarity.

We are echos of that note but unlike many others, one which retains it's proper pitch.

I'm sorry. I have found myself this evening to be quite oblique, yet impassioned. We should not define this by history. It is a living breathing thing. It is not a case of perfection. Elite is a stream that flows, to be closer to the source is still to sit by a river.

Purity in relation to longevity is a fallacy.

Still it warms the heart to see old tech run.

Lovely to see that Fritz, beautiful setup you have there!

But I must admit, playing Elite isn't as fun as it was before I started with Oolite. There are some details I'm missing now!

Oh look, a Competition pro 5000 joystick!! great for Decathlon and summer games 1 and 2, 15 quid!! oh those were the days!

(goes off on some mumbling preamble about how much bigger mars bars were in those days)


toodles

ZM

Actually it is a "Speedlink" remake, less than 10 years old (that's why it looks so new). But the outer shape and the feeling is almost like the original. I think there is another version of this joystick with USB port for use with emulators running on PCs.

At the time, I used to have "Spectravideo" joysticks. Most of my Elite career I played using a QuickShot II Turbo. It wouldn't have survived Summer Games for very long, but for Elite it was fine. I still have it, but it is so worn out that it isn't really useful anymore.

I had several Joysticks over my c64 days, from the old Atari VCS one, had a quickshot 2 turbo, Comp pro 5000, konix speedking, also rewired an old analogue Acorn stick which became my Elite stick. Thing had pots and yaw adjusters for controlling x and y axis movement, really got lucky with that one.

Thing about the old VCS and QS2 was they were blister switch, so eventually the blister would stop popping either on or off, proving ultimately fatal for either. The Comp pro was microswitched, so they were indestructable, unless you took to throwing them at walls, and yes, i did that too!!

By the way, love the SX-64, probably worth a pretty penny that, I worked on the Commodore Stand at the PCW in 1988 and one of the guys had one running the C64 display dummy machine, he said that not many made it into public hands, too expensive to make and not enough interest.

Regards,

ZM

Zark Montor wrote:

Thing about the old VCS and QS2 was they were blister switch, so eventually the blister would stop popping either on or off, proving ultimately fatal for either. The Comp pro was microswitched, so they were indestructable, ...

The QuickShot I and II had had these blister switches, but the QuickShot II Turbo has better switches, not really microswitches, but using a little coil spring (Picture).

...he said that not many made it into public hands, too expensive to make and not enough interest.

The SX-64 wasn't very successful. On reason is that Commodore had announced a DX-64 with two floppy drives but never managed to bring it to market (I assume space and heat problems). So people waited for the DX-64 instead of buying the SX-64. And to be honest, the screen is too small to do anything serious with it for a longer time.