I have been trying to get into Elite as part of my retro-gaming hobby, but so far my particular combination of free time + learning-motivation-levels are like "best I can do is Space Trader for Palm".
I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander, etc.
Still, I love seeing the proliferation of things like this into Emacs. The psychology of Elite-type games has a strong propagation bonus factor within general tech psychology. It's like if you view tech as a mandelbrot set, you zoom in and you can start to see these little Elite wings all over.
(From recent discussions it seems like Lite-XL ought to enable this kind of effort too? Being SDL based and anything-goes on the scripting side, I'd just hazard a guess)
Space trader for palmos is the bomb! I spent way way too many hours playing that.
.. I may have that on my current android phone using a palmos emulator. There’s also an actual android port of it too though.
Did you ever get to play the leaked Elite 3D port for palmos? The dev couldn’t get rights for release so abandoned it. I cracked and released it after that. I was a beta tester. It’s a hoot. Works well. Even has a plug-in for the vibrator on the Palm M5xx series.
That's a good point about Android, I think I play the FDroid one or something like that.
I never saw the Elite 3D you mentioned, sounds great. How was the color palette? Just curious if it was more monochrome or colorful.
I was probably hitting the Cybiko Xtreme really hard at that time, having all but given up on gaming on my HP Jornada and finding some relief in the KayBee Toys clearance bin ;-)
I do have a bunch of space trading games ready to go here for when the right time comes, and I like to leave the Elite Plus attract screen open in a DOSBox window sometimes...
I didn’t know this copy existed till a few minutes ago. I’ve only played the one I had which was a version 0.9.5 or 9.7 iirc. So now I’m curious to test this out.
You don't even need a native emulator! CloudpilotEmu works great, and runs in any modern browser. You'll need to supply your own ROM, but those aren't hard to come by these days.
I did not get to play the 3d version. I'd love to try it out on my old TX, if you happen to know where a .prc might be found... ;)
> I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander, etc.
Why annoyed? Those are all excellent games to have spent time with. I still have very fond memories of Strike Commander, and even learned a thing or two about real jet fighters and their weapons with it.
For modern computers: remember there's always the Oolite project :)
Yes and don't have a filesystem with inode64...but hey it's much easier to just use wine for every game, native linux games are a joke (with the usual exceptions).
Define "joke". Bakc in the day a lot of people played emulated games from SNES/MD/MAME and webs like Newgrounds and alikes in Spanish (Minijuegos) than former AAA games. Later, lots of people were into Ogame.
On these libre games, such as Slashem, OOLite,OpenTTD, VegaStrike, Battle for Wesnoth and such a lot of people played more hours than they would acknowledge.
BTW, VegaStrike it's native and available on the distros.
In fairness, it looks more like the old Palm game Space Trader, ie roughly the same trade model but combat handled by dice rolls - if there's any code in here for Elite-style 3D combat, I've yet to see it. (Even without graphics and rendering to a text buffer, it would be a hell of a thing to get working in circa-2001 Emacs on a circa-2001 machine!)
That said, I do still play Space Trader, every now and again...
I'm okay with it not. I first got in the habit of building Emacs some time around 2011 precisely because distro builds all wanted to use GTK+ widgets and that caused a lot of crashes, and it turned out there's not honestly anything Emacs needs X widgets for, anyway.
That said, Emacs can embed a Webkit widget if you build it to, and I bet there's a web version of Elite out there - I'm sure the Internet Archive has it in emulation, if nothing else. I think that should count for about as much.
Probably because the online culture in 2003 was a lot tighter coupled and now it seems more spread out in different simultaneous directions. It even includes the obligatory Docker container.
This is wild. Elite is an amazing game. The NES port is particularly impressive given the limitations, not just with respect to pushing polygons, but to how carefully they chose to adapt the controls. And it is the only game, save for a few obscure modern homebrew roms, that manages to render polygons on the NES (though many games used sprite scaling and other techniques to pull off a 3D appearance with varying degrees of success).
I wish the NTSC version (which was never shipped on cartridges) could run without graphical issues on a real NTSC NES. Instead you need a PAL NES or a PAL Emulator.
Elite on the BBC Micro as a child, awesome. Still the best game I ever tried to play. Used to play it two-handed with a cousin of the same age, we'd load up his elder brother's saved game from cassette just to play with all the weapons. Now on emacs!
I remember his da, an engineer, talk abour ADA as a new-fangled thing, with Basic being deprecated as childish, in a good way
I played way too much Elite on the BBC micro (vs studying). As a kid learinging to program I thought Braben and Bell were gods. It blew my mind that my 6502 computer could manifest the experience that was Elite.
Braben went on to write Zarch/Virus that blew my teenage mind on the Acorn Archimedes A3000 which was the first ARM CPU that most people could actually get their hands on. Decades later Braben was one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi foundation with cheap as chips (when in stock) computers built around an ARM CPU.
The NES version famously recreated the vector graphics of the home computer originals by having RAM in part of its character ROM area on the cartridge, that could be used effectively as a framebuffer upon which the vector graphics could be drawn.
We never got this remarkable NES game in NA. More's the pity.
Nice, but for free as in freedom games, (and more complex ones) git check-out some from https://jxself.org/git/. I suggest Spiritwrak for a Zorkian adventure, and All Thing Devours for a crazy time traveling puzzle.
You can compile the required inform6 compiler (cc -o inform src/*.c; mv inform /usr/local/bin) and inform-lib with ease from that. When building some game with build.sh, if it fails, run "git submodule update --init --recursive" and run sh "build.sh" again.
I have tried to reimplement the Elite trading part in Javascript(back when I was learning the language, I need a 'practical project') but I've found the galaxy generation code to be inscrutable. One can implement line by line, but I haven't found an explanation for all the byte manipulation and magic numbers that are used.
EDIT: found this in the comments
"
Function and description taken from elite new kind sources. "
Huh. Maybe I should look into that (and "oolite" as well).
On the other end of the ridiculous spectrum there is a port of Elite II to the BBC Micro with an ARM second processor. With an upgraded video ULA it looks pretty good.
What’s great, too, about the been tube version is that both CPUs are actually used. At least with the dual 6502 version. I’m assuming the ARM may be a bit different.
I wish a better company was in charge of Elite Dangerous. They burned a lot of good will when they dropped console support. I miss flying space ships but I don't miss the unending grind and mostly empty galaxy. Wish it had a Mass Effect-like richness to it but it's essentially a menu simulator attached to an awesome space flight simulator.
I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander, etc.
Still, I love seeing the proliferation of things like this into Emacs. The psychology of Elite-type games has a strong propagation bonus factor within general tech psychology. It's like if you view tech as a mandelbrot set, you zoom in and you can start to see these little Elite wings all over.
(From recent discussions it seems like Lite-XL ought to enable this kind of effort too? Being SDL based and anything-goes on the scripting side, I'd just hazard a guess)