Looking for the perfect Valentine's gift? How about a week of retro gaming BBC Microlympics? Parents staring down the barrel of half term or computer fans with a fondness for the good old days, rejoice! The National Museum of Computing is marking the 40th anniversary of the BBC Micro with a week of retro gaming, including Chuckie Egg and Elite. Yes, we know we have to wait until December for the actual anniversary, …
I found the docking computers more of a hinderence - especially after I'd played for long enough to get the muscle memory on the roll keys down to match rotation without even thinking. I tended to make heavy use of the BBC not being able to process multiple pressed keys at once for some 'on a sixpence' manoeuvring. To my detriment I then could never get the hang of some of the emulated versions or re-emaginings on other platforms.
Oolite was about my favourite non-original - but I still found myself remapping keys to the 'old ways'
The C64 version didn't care what side if the space station you were on, therefore if you engaged it on the wrong side it would carefully ram your ship into the rear of the space station. It also struggled from too narrow an angle and tended to spend ages scraping the front face of the station rather than actually dock. As for caring about exiting spacecraft... nope... just flew into them...
When I did use the thing I'd tend to align the ship up approximately myself, enable the docking computer and then hit maximum time speed for instant dock regardless of ships in the way and so on.
In witchspace (knocked out of hyperspace by the thargoids) the docking computer could be used to target thargoid ships, just lock on, enable it, and the docking computer would line you up to shoot the thargoid. Unfortunately if often did this by slowing the ship down to an absolute stop which made one a bit of a sitting duck target...
It's about encouraging kids.... not kicking their asses. :D
Although if you do set it up can I suggest 'Daily Thompsons Track and Field' for round 2, that'll at least give the young a physical advantage....
(Then a week or so later, a certain demographic gets to coin the term 'Claw hand').
Ah Chuckie Egg, still pretty much the only game I have ever completed. Given that it was about 35 years ago I don't think the muscle memory will remain enough to make it worthwhile entering the competition now!
As for the months and years I spent playing Elite and still never managed to make it to Elite level :-(
Ahh Elite. I remember playing the BBC version, initially due to the number of keys involved my brother and I shared the flight controls and weapons. Later as I got more proficient I would happily operate the Cobra Mk III single crewed Started with the Tape version and then progressed to the Disc version where the docking computer would actually manoeuvre you in. It would sometimes botch the docking and you'd end up scraping paint or exploding.
Once docking was mastered I could dock manually at full speed and as far as combat was concerned, I could run away at full speed, switch to the rear view and happily treat my pursuer to a viewport full of military laser fire.
Then played again on the Archimedes and the Risc PC. Now I occasionally take the XBOX version for a spin. Having Norman Lovett (the original Holly from Red Dwarf) providing the voice for the cockpit voice assistant (or COVAS) is sublime.
Oolite for the win! Open-source version of the original, even down to the same missions - but with a whole lot more besides. And unlike 'Elite: Dangerous', it's still standalone so you don't need to worry about some annoying little moron who does nothing but play games all day popping your ship all the fricking time because he thinks it is funny.
My favourite music of all on the Beeb had to be the "hidden" music in the loader for Frak!
If you were naughty enough to copy the game, the loader would then play the theme music for Captain Pugwash.
Oh and I did make it to Elite as well. Was rather chuffed when I did.
One other thing to keep in mind as well was that the Disc version actually had missions as well. I can still remember the adrenaline hit when the screen flashed up "Incoming Message" after docking.
I taught programming to university students on the BBC Micro - their work was 'saved' on cassettes. Got some disc drives later and so could play Elite while they struggled with the exercises. I was quite amazed at the 3D feel of Elite and how immersed you got, even if it was all green lines. The game I remember being even more impressed with was the free flight simulator (not really simulator, not realistic, just fun) on the first Archimedes. There was also a flight sim game on SGI workstations around then (maybe even a bit later) and the Archimedes one was just as good apart from the fact that you could network the SGIs if you happened to have a few Indigos or Irises lying around.
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Maybe I should dig up my "hacked" copy of Revs, where - aged about 17 - I managed to find the bit in the code where the gearbox stopped at five forward gears and removed that limitation. Far from just a sequence of progressively "longer" gears, experimentation found that there were a couple of gears with both lightning fast accelleration and a top speed very much higher than normal. Thus it was possible to start from the back of the grid and be at the front before the first corner, and even if you spun off so little time was wasted getting back up to speed that it didn't really matter. Also changed the names of all the drivers to those of friends :-)
Or maybe I should find a way of digging about in the emulator's memory and see if I can stumble upon the same edit!
Would make a change to being beaten hands-down by offspring who are far better at SuperTuxKart either single-player or network mode than I am.
M.
There's one here: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=25
Oh my god, it can run in the browser. Well crap. There goes the rest of my evening...
*BYE
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