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

[DaddyHoggy]

OK, as I got all nostalgic about my C64 Elite days I thought I'd find out how early the rest of the commoonity first encountered (pun intended) Elite (or Elite+, or First Encounters or E:TNK, etc...)

I'll start us off - I was a C64 child (born 1971 - got first C64 in 1983)

[JohnnyBoy]

I had a Sinclair Spectrum in 1985, but a friend who had a BBC Micro said that he had this game where you could fly a ship anywhere in the universe, buy and sell stuff, fight with pirates - it sounded like a total freedom that was really exciting to schoolkids.

So I went to his house to play Elite. It was good, but I remember being disappointed because Chris hadn't learned all of the keys needed to play proficiently. So there was a lot of:
"Chris, we're being fired at - what do we do?"
[Chris frantically thumbs through the manual] "Uhhh, wait a minute, I'm just finding the right page...."

[Captain Hesperus]

OK, as I got all nostalgic about my C64 Elite days I thought I'd find out how early the rest of the commoonity first encountered (pun intended) Elite (or Elite+, or First Encounters or E:TNK, etc...)

I'll start us off - I was a C64 child (born 1971 - got first C64 in 1983)

1984: Elite on a 'proper' floppy disc for the Apple ][c and a tiny tv set that I squinted at until I was cross-eyed and tending to tilt my head ninety degrees to the left when walking through doors.

Captain Hesperus

[Wolfwood]

Commodore 64 for me as well. I played the game for hours and hours - it is practically an icon of my teen years.

[LittleBear]

BBC B (tape) when it came out, then BBC disk a couple of years later. I picked up a C64 for next to nothing in the early 1990s and played the C64 version. I never got to play ArchElite though, which seems regarded as one of the best of the orginal Elite conversions. Emulators for the Arch are easy to download but the copies of the files you need to run them seem unavailable.

[goran]

First played Elite on Spectrum in 1985. Then bought c64 and played. Then had AppleII in school and played there... Before oolite, used to play it on any emulator existing for mac. Now I'm settled.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

I started on a Speccy, and was heartbroken when the machine died and I couldn't get parts any more. Later, I had an Amiga that not only rekindled the old flame, but it also introduced me to Frontier.
As for First Encounters, well, I bought it as soon as it came out for PC.



Please stop laughing! I know, and I learned my lesson: never eat out of the oven. I'm NOT using Vista!

[DaddyHoggy]

Funny isn't that whatever machine you start on you then hunt it down in different forms.

As I initiated this I said I had the C64 version. I used to rent it from my local video store, who was well ahead of the times in that respect. Then one day I realised that somebody else might rent it, or worse somebody else might buy it so I asked the man who owned the shop, pleaded in fact and he agreed to set it aside as long as I kept "renting" it he'd keep it under the counter until I'd paid for it. I had to go six weeks without playing it but on week seven I went in and he gave me the game - hoorah!

Then I got an Amiga A500 and got Elite+ (I can't remember what the '+' was for) and later Frontier. When I was at uni somebody had snuck a copy of the original EGA (CGA?) version of the game under the sys admin's nose on the student room's PC (486DX100) so we had multiple commanders saved and played when we could rather than doing our work.

When I finally got a PC of my own (not until 1998) I got Frontier for it from a car boot sale.

Then I came across E:TNK before Christian Pinder was forced to pull the plug on it (and sadly the PC on which it was installed along with the install files died about six months ago along with the HD and the old back-up CD would not restore the files )

Then finally in Dec. 2006 I found Oolite and I found peace...

Everybody say "Amen"

[FSOneblin]

I started on oolite. That's all I have to say



Don't Panic: FSOneblin

[Damos]

I started on BBC B's at high school and at a friend whose father had one too.
Couldn't afford to buy bbc/b so bought an Acorn Electron. All black and white with few ships and no missions I think. Slow load times of tape forced me to buy a slogger expansion board and a ROM which enabled me to copy it to 3inch discs' ?T2P3 (tape to plus three - which was the disc drive)

Then uni and forgot all about it until Elite the new kind which I cam accross after reading how legal action had killed it off. Still managed to find a copy hidden on the web.

The last year trolling around Acord electron software archives came accross a reference to Oolite.

The rest is history. Even bought the Status Quo - which I thought was actually rather good!.

[s8404755]

My first encounter was with my Dad playing it on the C64, but I was too young to get into it at the time. I only started playing when we got the Amiga version a few years later. From then on I was hooked for a good few years.

Oolite has grabbed me once again - can't say what it is exactly, but this game has some kind of magic formula that just makes it really compelling (more compelling than the umpteen modern comercially produced games that I also own but am not motivated to play)...

[another_commander]

Speccy 48K for me. Elite grabbed me and would not let go. I would play either solo or with friends, usually in a pilot-weapons operator configuration, with the pilot doing all the manouvering with a joystick and shouting orders to the weapons operator, like "Missile! Now! I said NOW!" and the WO doing all the remaining work on the keyboard. Ah, those were the days!

Then, years after, I discovered E:TNK and EliteGL (the port of TNK to OpenGL). I started making some mods to the source, adding some AI here, a little feature there and all that good stuff, until one day TNK was pulled from the web. I am sure I still have the files somewhere.

One day I started searching for modern Elite clones for no apparent reason and discovered this little game called Oolite, which looked really good. Open source, too. Hmm, interesting, lets see how they make it look so nice. Downloaded source, found out it was ObjC. At that point I thought "WTF, I have to learn a new programming language to figure out what's going on here? Yeah, right, see you later". But for some reason, I kept coming back to it (had already downloaded the 1.65 binary) and did, in fact, look up some online documentation about ObjC. I discovered that it was not that hard to understand after all and after some experimentation managed to set up a build environment to make my own home made version. Got in touch with the dev team of that time, submitted my first ever patch for Oolite (the Advanced Nav Array) and you know the rest.

This is what the "spirit of Elite" is all about. After all these years, we are grown up adults, have jobs, families, etc. and we are still entranced by a simple kids' dream about flying a spaceship, visiting worlds and fighting space pirates. I guess magic does exist, after all.

[Frame]

yeah its almost a religon..

amen brother

I was on C=64 though, and discovered Elite fairly late, think it was in 1985-1986.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

I started on oolite. That's all I have to say

You could have voted, then... that option still hasn't got any votes.

[Disembodied]

I first saw Elite on a friend of a friend's BBC B, although I didn't get more than a few minutes of flight-time until it came out for the Spectrum. And then I had to pirate my own bought copy of the game to deal with the whole Lenslok trauma...