Elite for Emacs (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Elite for Emacs (2015)

salkosuo.net

271 pointsnanna44 comments

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...

Always wanted a cybiko. Had a jornada 720! Great devices for the time.

The game is very colorful. I loved it. Here’s the original website for it.

http://www.harbaum.org/till/palm/elite/index.html

And apparently he either released or something else a v1.0 with the source code and it is up here:

https://palmdb.net/app/elite-palm

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.

Oh that's pretty. Looks fun, thanks for sharing the links too. Amazing how far they took it on the platform, including Sony Clie multi-track audio!

Can you imagine it on like the Tapwave Zodiac? I wish i kept mine. Palmos game system. Analog joystick and all. Was so awesome.

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 :)

Take privateer first the "gemini gold edition" ;)

https://privateer.sourceforge.net/

Tried it but can't get it to start due to an issue with parsing the config, it looks like.

~/.alsoftrc:

> (define devices '(arts esd native))

Not sure what to do but it's segfaulting when trying to work with that.

Linux? If yes try the windows version with wine. (the better linux runtime for games)

Or simply delete the "artsd" string and Pulseaudio with ESD support will do its magic.

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.

I don't talk about opensource distro embedded games.

(I'm always pleased when I click on a submission and it's exactly what I inferred it could not be.)

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...

At first I assumed it was going to be based on this: https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Space_Empire_Elite which is more like the trader type games you're talking about.

There was a history of BBS "door" games with this style of interface, that would have been quite adaptable to Emacs.

But yeah, his link to 'Elite' does take to the classic 3d game.

Nifty.

Well, if Emacs supported XEmbed, you could just render a dumb easy X11 port of Elite with wireframe graphics.

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.

Emacs with Lucid or Athena and with proper UTF8 support with Unifont would work okay in the 99% of the cases.

Also, an Elite port with XLib or XCB would be totally doable. I've already played a Jet Set Willy port for X.

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.

I too was so ready to be disappointed...

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.

See the story about how Elite came about if you’re curious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWoF5uVgbA

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.

My favorite NES game has always been Elite [1]. It's really a marvelous gem, that, in my opinion, is not well known. Happy memories...

[1]: https://www.justgamesretro.com/nes/elite

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.

Emacs has a Infocom interpreter too, Malyon.

M-x package install malyon; load a Z? file: M-x malyon.