Elite: Dangerous

[PFX]

If you're of a certain age, you will remember the ZX80/81, Spectrum, BBC Micro and so on. A far cry from home computing these days! The following should be of interest to any of my generatio

Anyway, one of the most ground-breaking pieces of software (in my opinion) that appeared, had to be Elite, then Elite: Frontier. It broke the mould quite literally in terms of gameplay and graphics and led to me spending far too long in front of a monitor. I've always been on the hunt for something similar but have yet to find a good replacement, Dark Star One being close, but no cigar.

I was delighted to hear David Braben (half of the team behind the originals) is planning to release a version of Elite for the modern generation, Elite: Dangerous. He's raising funds via the http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/146 ... -dangerous site and if the target is reached, development will continue with planned release in 2014. I'm in. Hoping more of us early gamers get on board too along with the younger generation.

[Warbo40]

Think i can vaguely remember the original while i was at school which had bbc computers. The first time i got into games consoles and computers was way back in the early 1970s when Atari released the Pong home version which was a tennis / ping pong game.

The whole family were mad about it so much it blew up within about 6 months with over use.

I've had a ZX spectrum, zx spectrum +3, amiga 1200, playstation 1/2 & 3, xbox and xbox 360 over the years.

[Nexusdj]

Spectrum for me was , Manic miner , The Hobbit , Flight simulator and football manager .

The hobbit :
Kill gandalf ! ,
Kill gandalf with what ?
Kill gandalf with the knife .....
You have killed gandalf

Up till 6am on many nights in the summer holidays playing .....
Nothings changed

[blackwatch13]

Had an ....
Amstrad 464
Amstrad 6128
Sinclair QL

I've still got a working retro


Amiga A1200 Z4

[Warbo40]

Spectrum for me was , Manic miner , The Hobbit , Flight simulator and football manager .

The hobbit :
Kill gandalf ! ,
Kill gandalf with what ?
Kill gandalf with the knife .....
You have killed gandalf

Up till 6am on many nights in the summer holidays playing .....
Nothings changed

Manic miner classic.

[bird_d00]

Why would he try to raise funds for a rewrite of Elite when a decent freeware alternative already exists ? Only trouble is it's much much harder than the original.

http://www.oolite.org

Regards
Dave Bird

[greeni]

I used to love playing Elite, going to get the Elite Dangerous when its out....

I play freelancer a lot, it is very similar to elite.

[welsh37/5]

Might as well share some of my own memories of gaming and the various pc's/consoles which hooked me into gaming from a young age. At 6 years old, I discovered after helping my old man cleaning out the loft one spring, I found his old Atari 520 xst and was amused (once we found the various leads) that it still worked, it would be this same machine and the rather basic racing game called turbo that got me hooked into console/pc gaming despite probably being more basic than the erlier and more popular commodore 64 machine of the time.

I would spend most weekends over the next couple of years playing various games on the old Atari st until it finally kicked the bucket after a couple of years gaming. Despite this, I was given one year another old atari albeit a 7800 with probably one of the worst games ever released at the time being winter games, never once did i manage to land the skier properly!

Gaming would eventually move on by the time I was 13 onto the more modern original playstation with the vast array of various titles available although gran turismo 2 being my favorite of the time. It would be this platform that I just happen to find a playstation port of railroad tycoon II which I found after trawling through the used ps1 titles at my local gamestation store although it was certainly difficult to control the cursor with a playstation controller rather than a typical computer mouse as with the pc version of the game.

Gaming eventually moved onto the pc when about 12 years ago, I uncovered a used original copy of transport tycoon deluxe just happened to be at a local charity shop which got me hooked onto pc based transport management games which would eventually naturally lead me onto trainz 2004 back in 2005 after being introduced to the game by a good college friend.

I still occasionally play emulated titles from the snes and Mame emulators although it would be the atari machines from the past that got me hooked into the world of virtual gaming. These days I don't normally have that much time for playing resource intensive games although I still play ttdx in the form of open ttd which still brings a smile to my face thanks to the communty supporting it.

Although perhaps this thread has probably gone quite off topic with my random rambling although who can honestly say a game in which was released about 1995 for windows is still with us today albeit heavily modified? Its just a shame that despite recently also managing to get war of the worlds for the pc after all these years that sadly it wasn't fortunate enough to work on the modern pc of today sadly.

[bird_d00]

a game in which was released about 1995 for windows is still with us today albeit heavily modified?

The original Elite was written for the BBC micro not the PC, and it was not a Windows game. The PC version was a much later (and much poorer) port, which despite the vastly increased memory available managed to loose several features included in the Beeb version (notably the missions).

I started gaming with a precursor of Elite played on a teletype connected to a mainframe computer back in the late 1970s. Eventually bought myself a TRS80 after tinkering with an early Commodore PET at University which blew up with monotonous regularity (about every other week!) I still have the old TRS80 in the loft, and it still works, and has a huge 48K memory and disk drive - wow, seems tame now but this was cutting edge stuff back in the early 80s. Later bought a BBC model B and had a huge collection of games for it.

Since discovering Beebem I am able to recreate some of my misspent youth replaying all those old BBC micro games. Trouble is I don't seem to have the attention span now and a lot of these early games become boring very, very quickly.

If you want to run old PC games like War of the Worlds, try using DOSBox - it can run most old games, but a few like Gunship or Sherman M4 manage to crash it occasionally.

Dave Bird