Francis Spufford's excellent book "Backroom Boys - The secret return of the British boffin" (which I bough after seeing it recommended by another commentard on an El Reg story about RAF Spadeadam) dedicates a chapter to Elite. Well worth a read.
In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done
Just a fortnight under 40 years ago, the BBC Micro was released. Although it was never primarily a games machine – it was too expensive, for a start – nonetheless one of its defining programs was a video game: Elite. Its source was released a few years ago, but your correspondent just discovered a lavishly described and …
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 16:50 GMT Liam Proven
Just FWIW, the link in the sentence that says the programmers originally planned to have 2⁴⁸ planets (until Acornsoft vetoed it) is to that very chapter from _the Backroom Boys_. :-)
I think it's in my TBR pile somewhere, but said pile in itself constitutes a small library. You know how _tsundoku_ is…
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 10:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Definitely never ever sat up...
...all night with a debugger removing the profit protection. Actually I was making coffee for the guys doing the work, but I was there, man, I was there!
Non trivial hack to say the least.
End result was a floppy copy which didn't need a manual.
fun times.
AC cos, well you know... that sort of activity is frowned upon by people...
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 22:57 GMT The Basis of everything is...
Re: Definitely never ever sat up...
Lenslock. A pretty neat idea - display a scrambled 2-character code that you can view with the corresponding fresnel lens for that program. I think we had 3 of them in the end.
The issue with Elite was the distributors put the wrong lens in large number of boxes and there was no way to tell if you had the right lens by looking at it. IIRC Firebird eventually worked out what happened and exchanged the lenses and gave a free game too (which was rubbish!). But it killed lenslock as a product and then of course Multiface 1 came along and debuggered most speccy copy protection.
Curiously my mate could guess the lenslok code for Elite pretty reliably if he held his glasses at just the right angle in front of the screen.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:18 GMT RPF
Re: Definitely never ever sat up...
Using EOR with a small loading routine was brilliant; you could not modify the only readable bit of code otherwise it all turned to gobbledigook. Remember these guys were undergraduates when they wrote this!
Brilliant programming and more of the same was in Johnathan Griffith's book "http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22619/Creative%20Assembler%20-%20How%20To%20Write%20Arcade%20Games%20for%20the%20BBC%20Microcomputer%20/"
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 10:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Read somewhere that they had to scrap a whole galaxy because there was a planet called "Arse"!
Love Elite, felt like you had your own spaceship and could do anything you wanted. You weren't in some space navy fighting off aliens for example.
Now looking back, it does look rather simple. All the star systems look the same and you did the same thing when you arrived there, but it was fun!
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:11 GMT Gordon 10
Oh yes. There were 3 illegal items irc Slaves, Narcotics and something else?
Don't you remember pirating Pythons or similar then scooping up the ejector pod to sell as Slaves?
Only trouble is it got you flagged by the Space Rozzers so you could only dock in the systems rated dodgy and littered with pirates, so there was often a chance you'd get swarmed by pirates yourself.
And if you went pirate hunting yourself you could make yourself illegal if you scooped up narcotics then flogged them off when you docked, and again the Space Rozzer Vipers would come after you.
Sometimes it was better to eject the cargo containers and blow them up. Always felt evil when doing that to slaves.
Happy days though.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 14:48 GMT Allan George Dyer
@Gordon 10 - "Don't you remember pirating Pythons or similar then scooping up the ejector pod to sell as Slaves?"
If you sold the slaves in the same system that you picked the ejector pod up in, you didn't get flagged by the Space Rozzers, I can't remember if the same was true for the narcotics.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 13:15 GMT John Jennings
I had to format my HD to stop playing that game. I knew I had a problem when I moved jobs so I could nip home for lunch to set up orders and move cargo.
There was nothing like being in a battle with 700-1200 players in fleet - Never progressed to the Titans - BS & Logistics here mostly -(with some scout work)...
CEI/Eve Razor/Northern Coalition.
That game is digital Crack
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Thursday 18th November 2021 13:55 GMT Loyal Commenter
...if you really like spreadsheets and being griefed. Eve Online is very much a multi-player game, which is fine if you have the time and inclination to be part of an active corp. but that's getting very close to being a second job. At least Elite:Dangerous allows you to play solo, and doesn't have the risk of having your ship randomly blown up in space "for the lulz" while you're logged off / in the toilet / etc.
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Friday 19th November 2021 07:08 GMT steviebuk
Problem I had with Eve was being new and being a target for real humans. The best bit of Elite was that it was all alone, no other human to exploit whatever bug they'd found.
Then along came the new Elite Dangerous which I backed and we were told would be offline. Then we were lied too. Not only is it online only (so no option to backup your save games) but its with other humans. Granted you can turn PvP off but still feel robbed that despite being told it would be offline it isn't. So you can't play around with your save to "see what happens" every choice you risk losing everything, which is an arse if you blow up due to docking issues and net connection, at least in Frontier Elite (the one I played) you could reload your save.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:02 GMT TheProf
Joysticks
I bought the official analogue joysticks just to play this game.
Didn't quite make Elite status before the end date to get the Elite badge so I have the shameful 'silver' medal.
Later versions lack the charm of the flickering wireframe original spaceships.
>>Thargoid bites space-dust.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:33 GMT GlenP
Re: Joysticks
I bought the official analogue joysticks just to play this game
I built my own, mainly with parts from Tandy*. Apart from the analogue joystick and fire buttons it included direction switching to reverse the joystick (as you could hold it either way round) and trimming to get constant speed rotation of the ship.
*We nearly got banned for, "playing with things you don't know anything about!" The group of us ended up, between us, with 6 computing or maths and computing degrees, including 3 Firsts. I think we knew somewhat more than the sales droid,
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 14:42 GMT MrBanana
Re: Joysticks
We had a joystick cobbled together from a coffee tin (Maxwell House I seem to remember), a BIC Biro, and some stiff rubber bands. You tell that to young folk today with their GPS enabled, laser controlled, trackpads, and they won't believe you.
[ Next up: Not The Nine O'Clock News, with "RS232 Interface Lead" ]
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 16:40 GMT Chael
Re: Joysticks
I had a bought joystick, but it didn't have a trigger on the stick so I made a footpedal for the laser out of meccano and a microswitch, so that I'd have my other hand free for the keyboard, to target missiles etc... Spent a lot of time on that game, but never got past Dangerous.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 19:42 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Re: Joysticks, and levelling up
If I recall correctly, progression up the rating scale went in powers of two of the kill count, so it took just as long to go from Dangerous to Deadly as it did to go from Harmless to Dangerous. Well, I suppose one's kill rate increased, but not enough to make it possible for me to get past Deadly on a C64.
I've mentioned before that OOLITE does quite a good job of recapturing the feel of Elite while expanding its horizons a bit.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 12:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Joysticks
I seem to recall (on the BBC) you could force a drop out of hyperspace and get bounced by the Thargoids? I used to do that just to shoot up the mother ship so it would drop those little fighters, then blow up the mother ship and go pick them up (they went dormant).
You could make good money on those (as long as you had enough fuel left to make a jump to a system somewhere).
Never saw a Generation ship or Dredger though. Don't know if they actually existed in the game.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 23:10 GMT ibmalone
Re: Joysticks
One of the things that really makes Elite is the imaginative universe created, both in the star system descriptions, but also touches like including the Dark Wheel (which I've still never read, should get hold of a copy, I had Elite Plus which had the ship manual and other bits and pieces), both Elite 2 and First Encounters carried on that tradition with short story collections with each. Elite 2 came with a big fold-out star chart covering a lot of the area around Sol. It did occasionally go too far, I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out the Mirage in Elite 2 (which turned out to be a hoax, but pre-internet not an easy thing to discover).
When you're filling out a procedurally generated universe where everything is going to look much the same it really helps to engage the imagination a bit. In a weird way the original Elite had the easiest job here, contrast Elite Dangerous where modern technology means a lot of effort can be put into creating interesting things to discover, though ultimately they all just repeated procedural elements. (The Stellar Forge used by ED is fascinating, while Elite placed stars 'randomly' across a map and chose a few characteristics, ED's galaxy is generated from the known properties of our own, to try to produce scientifically plausible stars and star systems, https://80.lv/articles/generating-the-universe-in-elite-dangerous
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Thursday 18th November 2021 07:31 GMT Screepy
Re: Joysticks
+1 for the Stellar Forge used by today's ED.
I went to FX17 (Frontiers own expo) in 2017 where they had all the lead devs giving talks about various aspects of the game.
Frustratingly I forget the guys name who was lead on the stellar forge design but he gave a fascinating talk on the complexities of creating it.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 07:59 GMT AndrueC
Re: Joysticks
Had the Spectrum version, which you definitely could force a mis-jump. Can't remember how though.
Shift+F just prior to jumping (unless that was the CPC version).
I got to Elite on all Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and BBC. I skipped the Comodore version because:
a)It's on a Comodore.
b)
TribblesTrumbles seemed a stupid idea.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:02 GMT AndrueC
Re: Joysticks
Speccy had a worse bug. Start the game. Save your character before undocking. Load the saved character and now you have 255 of everything in the hold including an overfilled fuel tank. If I remember correctly when Firebird released Elite they ran a competition and Speccy owners were excluded because of this bug.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:37 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: Joysticks
Yikes! My X-56 Rhino (that I bought for playing Elite:Dangerous) cost less than that, and that was last year during the "great HOTAS stick shortage" when the cheapo Thrustmaster ones were going for multiples of their RRP.
A quick search shows that £399 these days would get you a Thrustmaster Warthog, which I believe is considered to be the Rolls Royce of flight sticks.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 01:01 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Joysticks
"I played the Acorn version, it was the only machine that could handle shaded polygons at the time. People venorate the commador amiga but it really was weak in comparison."
That there's fightin' talk!!
There were a lot of nice things about the Beeb, I had many to play with where I worked, and lots of nice add-ons the average user could only dream about, but claiming it was better than the Amiga is just...wrong. 8-bit as opposed to 16-bit for starters. The amazing Amiga graphics had incredible strengths in most areas, but could be weaker in others. It's such a shame that the port of Elite was so poor though. Fairly low res., pitiful sound effects to name but two. That port could have been soooo much better.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 00:45 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Joysticks
"I bought the official analogue joysticks just to play this game."
The best where the ones without auto-centring or where that could be be mechanically disabled, It made docking without a docking computer much easier.
On the other hand, I was spoiled rotten at work playing Elite. Being an educational establishment, we had bought in some CAD package or other. Clearly not very memorable after all these years. But it was a super duper CAD package that cost a lot of money. Apart from the disks and manuals, also in the box was a 6502 coprocessor and a device called The BitStik!! The BitStik was basically a none centring analogue joystick the size of a large trackball with a knob sticking out of the top. Said knob was also a rotatable pot for Z-Axis control in the CAD package. It was also fully supported by Elite and would control the throttle making manual docking piss easy, set speed, set roll and go! :-)
Ah, Here is the Bitstik, from Acorn themselves no less. Seems that was the CAD package name too. Interestingly it wasn't new. It was a rework of a product aimed at Apple ][ users 2 years earlier. But still, 2 grands worth of kit to play a 20 quid game LOL
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:08 GMT AndrueC
Re: Joysticks
I never understood anyone wanting to play it with a joystick. I could never get the hang of it. I have always preferred to use the keyboard.
S,X,<,> and spacebar to fire. What more does one need?
Actually for the Speccy what you needed was a keyboard with a spacebar. Luckily my brother and I upgraded the keyboard of our shared speccy sometime prior and the 48k keyboard had a spacebar. That still meant using N,M but that was no hardship.
:)
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:36 GMT Dan 55
Here at the office he sits reading an article. The air is cold. He tuts under his breath.
"The difference being that unlike Singleton's ZX Spectrum game, you can read about what Elite did on the Elite Wiki and then study the source code to see how David Braben and Ian Bell achieved it."
There is the source code for the DOS remake available and you can read the blog by Chris Wild. Until recently there was a mobile version but the toolchain which was used to compile the game was retired which means that the game is unavailable while it's being re-written, as not keeping it up to date with the latest and greatest Android and iOS causes support issues.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:53 GMT David Gosnell
Galaxy generation
I understood that the galaxies were generated based on using the BBC B ROM image as a pseudo-random number generator, and that this was one of the hindrances with releasing it for other contemporary platforms given that the ROM was copyrighted and would need to be redistributed. Not such a problem with later ports, without such constraints on static storage.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 18:20 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Re: Galaxy generation
Theres actually a trick to using a pseudo random number generator algorithm
If you use the same 'seed' number for the generator each time, then the output of the generator is the same everytime
Eg
Set the seed to 5000 and generate the next 10 items.
Then you'll get 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
Okj, move to a different PC , use the same program with the same seed
and you'll get 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
So now you can generate a galaxy using nothing more than the algorithm to generate the values and a set number to ensure you generate the same galaxy no matter what.
Its quite a neat little trick really......... unless you want to generate some truely random numbers.... say for public/private key encryption...
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:53 GMT Pascal Monett
Ah, the halcyon days of tight hardware resources
Back then, you had to be competent to make a game run. The difficulty getting anything on screen was already a first hurdle and, as said here, once you had your screen you had crumbs left over for the code and data.
Nowadays, they'll just tell you that you need 16GB of RAM to run the game, but hey! there's 7,486,684,325 planets to explore !
And they're all in memory.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 11:54 GMT TeeCee
Hang on...
Elite was pure mono wireframe, I played it to death. The telly was colour, but the game wasn't.
I did see a BBC version that painted the wireframes with solid colour and very nice it was too. Trouble was it was on a machine with the second 6502 and the Z80 tube, which it required.
Also an actual, honest-to-god CUB monitor standing on a bridge containing two Winchester disks, which weren't required.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 13:11 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Hang on...
The lower part of the screen was mode 5 (i.e. two bit's per pixel) which gave it four colours, but only 160 pixels wide. I was convenient that the vertical resolution was the same in both mode 4 and mode 5 at 256, as the mode switching did not have to do anything with the vertical scan rate.
It was driven by one of the user programmable timer interrupts, which allowed them to insert some code, which at a set time after the video frame started, would jump in and twiddle the mode registers in the ULA. Because these timers could be upset by other interrupts, they were a little imprecise, which sometimes meant that there was some tearing at the divide between the two modes.
On the 6502 second processor, and after minor tweaking systems with shadow RAM for the screen (B+ and later), it would work in mode 1 (2 bpp, four colours) for the whole screen, but I don't think it used solid colour anytime I saw it running on a BBC, even with a 6502 second processor. I know some other variants on other systems did.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 19:56 GMT AndyMTB
Re: Hang on...
I had a TI-99 computer, onto which I tried to code a finite element stress engineering program. I soon ran out of memory, but then had the idea to use the full-colour graphics processor. By coding an integer into a character and shoving it onto the screen, I could then revisit the cell and work out the number eg red-upper-C = 78. Ran like a dog of course but very interesting seeing the graphical representation of a matrix being solved on the screen as the program worked its way down the diagonal.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 01:08 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Hang on...
In the early days of 8-bit computers, some games used up the whole RAM as part of (or incidently) copy protection since there was no where for the copy programme to reside. It wasn't unusual back then for video RAM to be 7-bit, no lowercase letters. but then upgrades came out making the 1K video RAM up to 8 bit and a new char. gen for lower case. then copy programmes came out which loaded into video RAM so you could watch it work while it loaded then saved a "full RAM" game :-)
(Pre Speccy/Beeb/C64 days)
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Thursday 18th November 2021 14:10 GMT AndrueC
Re: Hang on...
Similar tricks were used to get smooth scrolling on a CPC game (changing the scan offset) but most impressive I think was the 10 second countdown on the Speccy Starion game (it was something of an Elite clone). They flicked the border colour back and forth so that the digits filled the entire visible screen area.
You can see it here, near the beginning after they finish dicking around redefining the controls.
I seem to recall that Popeye tried to do something cute to overcome attribute clash but ended up running far too slowly to be fun.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 23:31 GMT Dante Alighieri
Re: Hang on...
Electron version was in mono.
Really liked moving on to the Archimedes version though!
I'm sure the Electron had a "very" prefix to ranks and I seem to recall I am "Very Deadly" on an Electron - I've still got it and the tapes to check but don't wish to be sucked into that black hole again as I would have to finally get Elite.
Came with a set of postcards for the ships which are cool.
Arch was great. Of course I had the commander editor to try out a few of the tweaks but still ran a "vanilla" untampered one for real. Still have the A420 and RISC PCs too...
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 12:37 GMT goodjudge
Re: Ah Elite !
"Have you tried Oolite?"
I tried it a while ago and it looked good but after years of intensive playing of Elite in the 80s (only got to Deadly though) my fingers automatically fell into A/S/X and <> and refused to work properly in the Oolite keyboard configuration.
I bought a floppy disk release for Win95 that I've copied onto successive computers since, and it still runs on Win7, but it's not as good as the BBC cassette version.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 12:32 GMT John 110
Re: Ah Elite !
The Amstrad CPCs played Elite very well, even including a handy bug involving approaching a station at high velocity then hitting hyperspace at just the right moment resulted in a docking computer-free dock.
(IIRC it was a long time ago (and in a galaxy...))
Nostalgia buffs can also experience the thrill of manual docking in Oolite...
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Thursday 18th November 2021 10:24 GMT breakfast
Re: Ah Elite !
There was actually an even easier bug (I found it by accident, not sure how widely known it was) on the Amstrad where if you died on your way to a space station then went into the menu and hit "save" it would save the game as if you docked successfully. That really got me through the first few hundred credits until I could afford docking computers...
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:48 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: Ah Elite !
Also very useful if you wanted to make a tidy profit trading in anarchy systems, you could fight the pirates for profit, until you got killed, then just save into the local station!
Got myself to "Deadly" that way. Never did put in enough hours to make Elite. I had homework to do!
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 12:53 GMT ChrisC
Lave Station, requesting clearance to launch...
I hate to think how many thousands of hours of my younger life was spent piloting a Cobra Mk3 in various iterations of Elite - started on the BBC at my friends house, then got hold of the Spectrum version as soon as it was released, and finally the Amiga version. And then back to the BBC version many years later via emulation on my Android phone... thank the maker we didn't have the ability to carry Elite in our pockets back in the 80s, otherwise I hate to think of how many MORE thousands of hours I'd have lost to the game!
In addition to all the obvious achievements of the game, an honourable mention has to go to the way it so elegantly managed to provide a clear indication of the position in 3D space of the nearby ships - that area scanner display was a work of pure genius.
And nice to see an article about Elite that mentions both Braben AND Bell.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 13:14 GMT TheFifth
Re: Lave Station, requesting clearance to launch...
I loved the way the scanner worked. I found it completely intuitive and very easy to work with. Oddly, I had a friend who could not work it out at all, no matter how many times I tried to explain it to him. I guess his mind didn't work in 3D (like flat earthers' minds).
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 13:18 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Anyone remember Aviator, before Elite...?
I found Aviator difficult to play. I had a pair of the dreadful Acorn analogue joysticks (given as a freebie as my order was delayed so long), and in order to fly the Spitfire, I needed to extend the stick by unscrewing it, and then using a ballpoint pen barrel in it's place to make it about 6 inches long.
And you needed to hold the joystick between your thighs, just so your other hand could operate the peddles and throttle.
I also found Revs a bit difficult as well. Maybe I was just no good, but I used to be able to play Missile Command and Battlezone really well in the arcardes.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 14:01 GMT ChrisC
Re: Anyone remember Aviator, before Elite...?
Yes, that was another of the games in the copious collection my Beeb-owning best friend had at his disposal, and an early example of the genius of Geoff Crammond. It also, along with Psion Flight Sim on my Spectrum, kicked off a long-lasting love affair with flight sims.
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Wednesday 17th November 2021 14:06 GMT ChrisC
Re: Horrible game ;-)
Mining lasers were however rather useful (though possibly only on certain versions of Elite) in combat if you had good aim, as whilst they suffered from a fairly slow firing rate compared with the military lasers most players lusted over, the amount of damage they'd cause with each hit was significant.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:35 GMT ChrisC
Re: Horrible game ;-)
I don't recall there being any limitations on which of the 4 mounts you could equip with mining lasers - IIRC the setup I settled on was military lasers to the front, left and right, and mining laser to the rear, as on the odd occasions when I did actually use it for its intended purpose, it was quite useful to have your Cobra pointing *away* from the asteroid, so that if you'd got slightly closer to it than you ought to have at the point where the laser completed its task, you could just punch the throttle and achieve a more suitable seperation distance before swinging round to make the pickup.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 11:51 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: Horrible game ;-)
You could fit four lasers, front, back, left and right. The mining laser was definitely the best - the Amstrad version did have asteroids in it, and as well as making profit from mining them and getting the fragments (IIRC you got 0.5 creds for just blowing them up), you could take out most enemies with one or two hits. The military lasers overheated really quickly too, and were totally not worth it!
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Thursday 18th November 2021 09:59 GMT NerryTutkins
changed computer games
I was a 13 year old kid when Elite came out. My friend already told me about it on his BBC micro, but his parents were weird so I'd never been over to see it. What he described seemed too good to be true. We had a commodore 64, but I was still used to games being a disappointment, where you look at the exciting pictures on the cassette box, and the reality of screenshots when you get things running was never anywhere near as good.
When Elite finally came out on the c64 myself and my brother spent the entire school summer holiday playing all day. It was the first "open world" game I can remember, with no particular aim other than just to improve yourself and your ship and just go around having fun.
I have oolite (an excellent open source homage) installed on my PCs, but my kids are unimpressed, even though the graphics are far better, it retains the charm and sticks very closely to the original, virtually identical trading screens, ratings, etc.
That these guys put it together with such a small team and on such puny hardware is nothing short of a miracle.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 10:00 GMT Anonymous South African Coward
Programs and games
In the old days every bit and byte was precious, and code had to be tight due to memory and storage constraints.
Back then profilers was also used to optimize your code, and devs would usually take their time to optimize their code.
Nowadays there's not a care in the world as programs and the such is very bloated. If it works, ship it, no matter if the customers PC choke on it, they can always upgrade.
Ask any modern software dev to code a wordprocessor or spreadsheet which'll work with 48k or 640k... and they will not be able to do so.
Sad to see that smartphone programs are also starting to exhibit signs of bloat.
Most of the time the extra functionality is not even used.
But it probably is just me, and I'll head out to my alpaca farm to ponder over this.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 22:19 GMT Warhead1954
Stuck in hyperspace with Thargons
I first played Elite on a BBC B in a Learning Resource Centre at a residential training centre run by the government department I worked for in the 80s. The manager used to leave me the the key so I could stay late and try out all the kit they had in the centre, but when I discovered Elite I spent many evenings engrossed in it. There were a few occasions when I was in hyperspace and being attacked by Thargon swarms, but instead of emerging into normal space after a couple of minutes, I was stuck in there for maybe 20 minutes, although it felt like hours. I don't know if this was a bug, or intentional. Sometimes I made it through, sometimes I didn't, but I'd be soaked with sweat every time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
