I was at a tech expo over the weekend and saw a copy of the original Elite! It is great to see how far it has come.
imgur.com/a/pCxs6#0
imgur.comPosted Sep 28, 2014, 5:28 AM UTC
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imgur.comI remember the first successful docking in Elite, it was so hard and great :) Dangerous keeps so much of the original - it just shows how brilliant the original game was.
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I have been consistently impressed looking back at how recognizable aspects of the original elite games are in Elite Dangerous.
The originals are as old as I am, but it is good to see that those who grew up on the originals should feel right at home.
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Elite was incredible but Frontier was just insane in coplexity all in a couple of kBs or MBs, there is still so much missing from the Dangerous compared to them.
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Oh I have no doubt, to clarify I was referring to things like the ship and station silhouettes as well as the referencing of the lore built up over the series. Looking at the back of the box was really like seeing a wire frame screenshot of Elite Dangerous which was quite remarkable.
In terms of missing things, I can see why it would be considerably more difficult to manage and why they are going to focus on them later. For instance landing on planets with the level of graphical fidelity they are aiming for, not to mention new aspects like accounting for multiple players within the simulation.
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I had an Acorn Electon in 1984 and was always jealous of my friends who had a Commodore 64 or Spectrum because of their much larger game libraries and superior graphics and sound.
Then Elite came along and for about a year only BBC or Electron owners got the pleasure of playing it and all those C-64 and Speccy owners were envious of us.
Gatherings of friends huddled around the computer with one person on missile targetting/ECM duties and one piloting while three or four looked on and offered advice on what to buy or sell to get the most profit. Great fun.
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Yep, I remember my first computer in 1979. 8K of ROM and 8K of RAM, loading programs from cassette tape at 1KB/minute. Having to watch for checksum errors, and rewinding the tape if a line bugged out. If the tape couldn't get the line correct, I wrote down the line number and manually edited it when loading was complete!
Still, the fastest booting computer I have ever owned: flick the power switch and BOOM: cursor appears and you are good to go.
Half-K (512 Byte) memory chips ("2114") at $20 each.... ended up with an expansion board and another 64 memory chips for a combined total of 40KB!
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This kind of thing I find very interesting. Your set up is before my time, but even within my lifetime the advancement of microelectronics has been nothing short of staggering. I can't think of another field of technological development that has advanced as fast as computers.
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I've been playing the original on a BBC emulator, and I now have an amazing amount of respect for anyone that got to 'elite' status.
I managed one out-and-back trip (so docked twice) and felt like a badass.
Docking is no joke in that game!
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Docking was terrifying! Death by Space Station was a real possibility. :)
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Will never forget coming home to see my Brother waving my (as yet) unopened copy of Elite for BBC Micro, out of an upstairs window, on my return from School...Bloody well RAN the rest of the way home! :D 3 TVs and uncounted joysticks later was finally Elite! Sooo many memories XD.