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MSX Elite

thefoggiest.dev

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The Oric [0] series of 8-bit computers got itself a re-make of Elite, some decades after all the fanfare:

https://defence-force.org/index.php?page=games&game=1337

It was extremely rewarding, as an original Oric-1 user who still has his systems, to .. finally .. get Elite on the Oric. And what an amazing re-make it is! Plays so well.

This is really cool, because the Oric was very neglected during its release period in the 80's - yet the fans of this wonderful platform have managed to keep the titles flowing over the years. We still get amazing new stuff ported to/made for the Oric ..

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric_(computer)

Besides from its official sequels, Frontier, and FFE (Frontier: First Encounters), plus obviously Elite:Dangerous, I encourage everyone to give a try to oolite (https://oolite.space/) which is in many ways the closest to the original game's spirit.

Also, I hear a funny looking ship appeared at Errius.

Right on!

It was incredible back then to play this on my msx. It seemed impossible how such a big game could fit. Of course ‘big’ was the feeling for the game content; it wasn’t big as such; it was cleverly developed.

It used all sorts of tricks. The text was generated from tokens. The galaxies were also procedurally generated, with a very careful seed to avoid expletives. In the MSX, it used some of the VRAM to store data. And so on.

It serves to show that a clever team is worth tens of millions of dollars (or pounds) of production.

The NES version is my favorite 8-bits game. Such mind blowing to have 3D graphics on this console. The manual referred to rock hermit, I spent many hours searching for them, without encountering any... I remembered discovering by accident how to escape hyperdrive and be assaulted by Thargoids. What a game!

Document source files is on GitHub [1].

[1]: https://github.com/markmoxon/nes-elite-beebasm

This explanation [2] on how the 3D was achieved may be interesting to you. The game X [3] used a similar technique to draw 3D on tiled backgrounds on the even more limited hardware of the old black and white (green and yellow?) Game Boy.

[2] https://www.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/drawing_vector_graphics_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(1992_video_game)

Thank you for these links!

It's funny that the herculean effort of porting NES to Z80 was done twice, completely separately - once for ZX Spectrum and once for MSX. I think the 6502 versions all share the bulk of the logic code (even the NES version).

The BBC Micro version came first, then it was ported to the Spectrum. Not sure where the NES comes into it, it was very much a latecomer.

latecomer, but actually shares a lot of the original BBC Micro code! https://www.bbcelite.com/nes/

I remember playing the NES Elite on an emulator quite awhile ago, and it baffled me that anything like it was even possible. 3D graphics, a huge open world, even a basic economy. I have no idea what kind of technical wizardry was required to get it working on the NES, but whomever did it deserves a medal; I'm envious because I know that I will be that clever.

Fully documented source code for Elite on the NES

https://github.com/markmoxon/nes-elite-beebasm

NES Elite had a bank of RAM mapped into CHR ROM, which the game could draw into like a framebuffer before the PPU displayed it like it would any other tile map.

So from a graphical standpoint, the wizardry was fairly straightforward but still exhibited a little outside-the-box thinking, which the NES supported with its extensive on-cart mapper and extension chip support.

> Sidenote 2: cloaking devices are often misused in science fiction. When a ship is cloaked, it is invisible, which means it lets through all light from behind. This means that this light is not entering the cloaked ship, which means that cloaked ships must be blind. This would be a fantastic story element since it greatly disadvantages any cloaked ship, but it is always missed.

Tangent: which fictional universe (book / game / movie / etc) has a great sci-fi space combat story element, and what makes it interesting?

I recommend Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series: one of the series' assumptions is the existence of ansibles for FTL communication -- in this universe, ansibles are deployed as fixed satellites/stations to provide communications for system-system commerce, finance, etc. There is a telecommunication megacorp that has a monopoly on ansible technology (Ma Bell ...in space) with it's own private corporate navy to defend their monopoly. As the series rolls on, other kinds of ansibles are encountered that are useful for military applications, and the last couple of books include fleet battles where the eponymous Ky Vatta develops tactics to exploit the informational advantage from FTL comms, vs making decisions based on information from ship scanners, subject to light speed scan-lag. Certainly not the first novel to consider FTL comms -- Le Guin introduced the term in the 60s -- but one that explores the consequences in a mil-sf series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/41099-vatta-s-war

edit: incoherent recommendation #2 -- there is some other book/series, the name of which i cannot remember, that really spelled out what space fleet action could be like with fleets engaging each other at extremely high delta-v. it did not at all resemble the ww1 fighter plane dogfights in space we see depicted in popular science fiction movies, books, games & space opera.

Lost Fleet[1] has fleet combat often take seconds during passes at extreme relative velocities

Honorverse[2], starting with second released book[3], introduced FTL comms in a world that until then could only detect certain events at FTL speeds - it's one of the main things that leads to very fast evolution of warfare in the sector of space which spills wider and wider. I think its take on impact on warfare seriously predates Vatta's War (still have to read Vatta's War, the first four novels in Familias Regnant universe were very good, have to one day get back and finish the series and take on Vatta's War).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honor_of_the_Queen

Tangent but I don’t really agree with the premise of the quote. Being cloaked wouldn’t need to imply no light enters the ship. A sufficiently advanced ship wouldn’t need to “bend” incoming light. Instead it could even absorb every single incidental photon and particle and then actively emit one with the expected behavior as if there was no object in that region of space. E.g. absorb photon on one side, emit one photon on the other side.

> Instead it could even absorb every single incidental photon and particle and then actively emit one with the expected behavior as if there was no object in that region of space. E.g. absorb photon on one side, emit one photon on the other side.

Honestly this is how I imagined all the sci-fi cloaking devices worked from the start. The surface would basically show what it looked like on the other side and the people inside the ship could still see out normally.

Could also just let in like 1e-51% of the light and now it becomes a game of who has sufficient technology to detect a ship-sized darker spot.

I guess you can get a similar effect by having a garage door beam set-up where you flash a bright light and try to detect a cloaked ship passing through the "beam" by seeing them take too long to re-transmit a photon.

Or a tiny opening in the cloak where the cameras/sensors are.

Lensman

/me runs away

You can play it online at: https://www.file-hunter.com/MSX/?id=elite

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get past the "Load new commander?" screen. I've checked all the Help/Settings keybinds, and nothing tells me what to do. I've pressed every key combination imaginable, and nothing happens. It's infuriating, most emulators have some documentation on "enter" or "action" keys, but not this piece of shit.

It's a yes/no question, so press n to play as the default commander Jameson (this is a fresh game, starting on planet Lave with 100 credits). On my tablet a virtual keyboard icon appears when I prod the screen. However, you start out docked in a space station and the next problem is how to launch. My carefully preserved BBC B Elite Space Trader's Flight Training Manual says to press F0, but the MSX doesn't have an F0 key. Hmm.

Edit: here's the MSX version of the manual:

https://archive.org/details/elite-msx-manual

The key to press to launch is 1.

Other number keys will give you different "views". While docked, these are screens like trading and so on. In space, you have the different viewpoints (and you can equip lasers on all of them :) )

> The key to press to launch is 1.

Thank you!

I played this on a friend's MSX. It was slower than on the Beeb, but impressive nonetheless.

By the time I finished college (about 10 years later), I could make animations with shading in C++ without a GPU on a 386 and no need for magical optimisations.

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