Oolite Bulletins

It's almost fitting that my first post is an introductionary one like this!

I am in Britain too - in the Midlands. Big Frontier player on the Amiga, then went to Elite then more recently (well, few years now) Frontier First Encounters.

Found Oolite thanks to the EBBS, not turned back since! Often have Oolite and FFE running together, however starting to play FFE less and less as I get more sucked into Oolite.

I'm a Brit, currently (as of February) living and working in Sydney.

Oooh, where are you moving to?

Moving to?

Sorry, missread it! Ignore the question, I was thinking you were coming from Oz to here! Where in Oz are you and where from here were you?

I'm in Sydney, as I said . . . In the UK, most recently Cambridge, prior to that Oxford, and previous to that Lincoln.

Well, I'm Australian and everyone I grew up with who liked computer games loved Elite. We all had a C64 out here. I don't know anyone who owned a Spectrum, and never saw one in a shop, and you couldn't get a BBC here either.

I lived in Norway when the Speccy came out, and those owners I knew, replaced them with vic20 and then C64. but then, most things in Norway are very homogenous. Brits maybe more obliged to stand by their Sinclair?

later, when Elite was launched with that big C64 Firebird campaign, I lived in Holland and there were a few of us (Zzap!64 subscribing game nerds) who were fast drawn to it and grew slightly obsessed, just in my small school. I'd think Elite sold well widely over Europe.

Murgh wrote:

later, when Elite was launched with that big C64 Firebird campaign, I lived in Holland and there were a few of us (Zzap!64 subscribing game nerds) who were fast drawn to it and grew slightly obsessed, just in my small school. I'd think Elite sold well widely over Europe.

Less so accross the Big pond. People in America have hardly even heard of ELITE.

Its a shame, really.

"How I became Elite"
by Arexack_Heretic, a Dutch Ooliteer.

I got my secondhand C=64 late in the game...
PC's were on the rise and even the mighty amiga was phasing out...
shops rarely had any good games for c64: the only game I ever bought was 'Starflight'.
I inherited a huge stash of pirated software though, of which Elite was my favorite.
It became quite an obsession which retarded my growth and only ended when my souped-up 4.25" drive blew itself up.

By the 90's I convinced my parents to purchase a PC and a new era of attic-leet bliss was entered with the purchase of Frontier.
When FFE was released, the old PC didn't hack it....so I waited patiently.
I purchased my first private PC when I started college in 1996 (IIRC), I was crestfallen when this system wasn't able to run FFE either!
(I blame mr. Gates for this trauma)
When I got my current PC together...last year...I also connected to broadband and had a lot of free time when I got laid off.

One sleepless night I decided to look for hacked versions of FFE and FE2, found them but also fould Oolite, which impressed the hell out of me although it was 'Mac-only'.
I decided to hang around and later on offered to help out.

Nowadays I'm retired and in orbit around a dead star, my python is loaded with luxury foods and decked out to the max.
My crew consists of female Arexian slaves, the best clones to be produced in the Empire, and they keep me quite occupied. They are not the main reason for my absence from the shipyards though.
It is the Research Project that makes up most of my waking hours, and some of my sleepcycles as well.
I'm trying to create a denovo biosphere inside one of the larger asteroids! At first progress was rapid, but recently I encounter setback after setback: Suddenly a variety of grass-analog that has been barely viable for years will become invasive and runover the entire biome, forcing me to activate its terminator genes. Once even a trumble somehow got inside and the entire rock had to be sterilised!
I could go on and on about my interesting varieties of Mangoroot and the clever ways in which I engineered the soil bacteria, but I can see you are getting bored....
[/i]

zzzzzzzz...

....ohh.. right he's finished!!!

English.
1984.
Speccy.
Totally addicted. ( this is how I looked most mornings = - the Lenslok didn't help!)
2004.
Oolite + Mac.
Totally addicted. (this is how I now look most mornings = - no lenslok - no excuse!!!)

Oooh! Where to start. Originally on an old BBC. Then found a version for the Acorn Electron (hell of a machine.. um.. no really...). BUt had been so absorbed by going into my local computer shop where they let you try before you buy! Imagine twenty 10 year old kids scowering the shelves for the $1.99 & $2.99 (that should be pounds, apologies), games while booting up elite and whatever else was on offer. It was like our own video arcade. And then there was Elite at a wapping fourteen pound ninety nine. Eventually went into partnership with a few friends, one of whom had a bbc, and purchased the bloody thing. Many an hour wasted needless to say.

Sorry, drunkling nostalgic rambling. But we moved swiftly onto the Archnimedes version which we fell in love with. Ever since then, never felt entirely comfortable with C64, Speccy etc... Ah well, geek parochialism. Played both for a bit though.

This was all in the UK of course. Forgot about it entirely until I got to Australia and set myself up, in a manner of speaking, in a situation where a semi permanent computer system was required. Et voila I guess. I got to thinking over the keyboard one evening and here 'tis.

Bugger! is my response really. I'm sure there's more important things I should be doing but damned if I know what they are!

Ah.. how I came across Elite...

I first played it a month after it was first released on the BBC Model B. I was 13. A friend (with rich parents) had it. My most vivid recall is the wireframe presentation but with addition of a new technique - 'hidden line removal'. Making the objects appear solid. A remarkable achievement I'd not seen before.

Infact, that moment was probably the single event that most influenced my career choice later on. Computers could simulate reality convincingly. Wow.

I played it myself mostly on a ZX Spectrum. I originally had a 16k model and bought the extra 32k mostly in order to play Elite. I became 'Elite' after many months of rapture! Despite lensloks and the occasional "R: Tape Loading Error."

Somewhere in the open ended game play, the vast nature of the universe portrayed, the encouragement for you to put your own imagination into the game and the novelisation that set the scene.... was the magic that is Elite. I think combined with some of the TV and books of the time (Ulysses 31, Hitch Hikers Guide, Blakes 7 etc) it was a perfect moment in time.

I was never too enamoured with the 16 bit age, and pretty much ignored the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. My next machine was a 386 SX PC.

I enjoyed FE2 immensely. As an astronomy buff, the realistic physics was actually more fun to me. FFE was a backwards step in many ways from my perspective. But neither of them were 'Elite'.

Elite didn't come back into conscious thought until I came across "The New Kind" a few years ago. I was very disappointed that the Palm version of Elite was never released.

Then on a search for an 'Elite' that would run on Linux I discovered Oolite earlier this year. The rest is history!

It's been over 20 years.

Elite, along with a number of things from the early 1980s will doubtless be with me the rest of my life, too important to leave behind.

Cheers,

Drew.

1987 - playing elite on an Amstrad CPC464 -- both green screen and colour monitor, depending on if it was mine or a mates. Hours of fun, made dangerous (was supposed to revising for exams).
1990 - Amiga 500 version, went from wire frame to solid graphics, was great. Reached Deadly on that version, must have been very close to Elite but save game died .
1995 ish - PC elite on a 486Dx266, followed by Frontiers, and FFE. F/FFE were awful, wouldn't work very well, crashed all the time, controls were crap!
2000 - emulated spectrum elite on PC, psion 5, PPC - fun but no lasting draw.
2006 - my sister was asking me about elite on the Amiga, which started me thinking about elite again - one Google search later brought me to Oolite. Was about to start on other games like X3 but am now hooked again. Deadly with 3800 kills so far - much nicer to know that Elite arrives at 6400.
Awesome - just like being a kid again (and still being distracted from revising for exams!)

I played the original UK AcornSoft version first on the BBC B, then on the BBC Master 128 for 4 colour justice! I never got into the Frontier sequals, and when I switched to PC in 1995 and was stuck with the awful PC Elite+ I was most disappointed.

Fast forward to 2006 and I buy my first Mac - lovely. Somebody pointed me toward the .kkrieger procedurally generated shoot-em-up, and I said "pah, elite was doing that YEARS ago with entire galaxies!" This spurred a nostalgic trip to Wikipedia where I was pointed to ... Oolite! I Mac native port of my favourite game of all time.

That was a week ago, and I have very little spare time at the moment. I have a successful mining business to run, you know. With just a little piracy ..