Elite / Frontier Elite Legend - ZX Spectrum 2021 - best 8-bit Elite?

[Arioch]

It's OK, I've figured out how to dissemble the Z80/SNApshot files (and TAP files) into pure ZX assembly language.

It's easy enough to do (see previous link from my last post) - it's understanding the assembler that (at the moment) is a bit intimidating; mostly I am used to high-level languages. The more you pore through these things though, the more they make sense. For example I've already found the (seemingly) random string used to generate the planet names, which is a good enough start as any!

The previous link can be used to dissemble any ZX snapshot type.

WRT to Elite however, I'll probably post to a moderator or general support, just to make sure I am not treading on any 16-bit toes

If it is permissible, I might offer to update the original 48K version with comments for all the routines in order to be able to better tackle the Legends version - then if FD want to they can release the ZX version assembler 'sources' to all and sundry (unlikely they'd want to, however!)

Might be something to get uploaded to the Elite Archives on Ian Bell’s Elite pages - there’s shed-loads of files for 8-bit Elite there

 

[Comandante]

Might be something to get uploaded to the Elite Archives on Ian Bell’s Elite pages - there’s shed-loads of files for 8-bit Elite there

It's going to be a long time in the offing... I am only about to start learning assembler, after all!

Thanks for the link though - I hope to make my way there one day, eventually...

 

[Arioch]

Something new that I hadn’t spotted previously or seen in any of the documentation: ship performance degrades over time!

A quick look back (and Google Translate) at the mod forum thread shows this little snippet in the 1.07 patch notes:

• Fixed: wear/damage operation of the ship's hull

I first noticed something was up when docking got easier - for some reason I was able to rotate at exactly the same speed as stations, and for some reason my Cobra Mk3 was displayed as green text instead of the usual white on my status screen. This was pretty cool for a week or so but then the green text turned to yellow text and stations were suddenly rotating faster than my ship could manage

Source: https://youtu.be/wilW7jWFVLQ

Not having a docking computer fitted (because I like hands-on approaches) this made things a tad more difficult, having to blast through the docking slot at just the right moment.

This gave me a reason to fit the Advanced Space Compass so I could seek out a Fuel Station - the only place where ship repairs can take place. Nearly 300creds of maintenance was awaiting my ship - I’m sure the mechanic was doing that sucking-through-their-teeth thing while looking at the engines

 

[starman]

IS anyone working on the Elite version for the Spectrum Next with enhanced capabilities?

 

[starman]

It's going to be a long time in the offing... I am only about to start learning assembler, after all!

Thanks for the link though - I hope to make my way there one day, eventually...

Assembler was never designed for human eyes. I would like to see some of the current dev try there hand at coding in raw assembler.

 

[Comandante]

Assembler was never designed for human eyes. I would like to see some of the current dev try there hand at coding in raw assembler.

I would love to see ALL high-level coders writing in assembler. And understanding it! There's a good reason high-level languages were created, after all...

FWIW, there are folks that still can code in assembler. More, I should say, that understand it like reading a book - typically REALLY low-level device coders. If I were to shout "Weirdos!" at them, it would only be in jealousy!

POST EDIT: if you use gcc, the GNU C compiler, you can actually output the assembler. Even for a simple program, it 'aint pretty!

 

[ZeeWolf]

I had every opportunity to learn assembly back in the day, had access to my brother's INPUT magazine collection. Just couldn't get my head around it. I prefered to look at the pictures or hammer out dodgy Basic code.

My computer science degree touched on it and I've been given interview excercises that involve imaginary memory/state management "machines" based on Assembly, however by the time I went to work at Codemasters circa 2000 it was C++, but there was a small cluster of the last UK "bedroom" Z80 coders still hanging around there making Gameboy colour stuff.

I think while most of us still making our living out of high level programming don't have to worry about tight hardware instruction, we do have new complexity like online/cloud and dealing with big data or infrastructure as code. Going for a developer job will expect experience of a growing list of technologies/products and will probably expect you to understand networks and container orchestration, analytics, SQL, Web API, continuous deployment, project methodology etc etc and I would happily bet on most of the engineers I work with would be able to revert back to something like assembly if their career depended on it. Writing code for a known end platform is kind of a luxury now.

Never too late to learn and we no longer have to rely on that one copy of "programming the Z80" in the local library... https://www.youtube.com/@ChibiAkumas/playlists

Back on the subject of Elite, D.Braben's GDC talk about Elite's code is really interesting and don't think its on YouTube https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

 

[Arioch]

I’ve just encountered the Cloaked Asp mission and, phew, it’s a bit more difficult than the original

The ship still has an escort of 2 Kraits but in Elite Legend the Asp remains cloaked until its energy runs out, at which point it starts flickering in-and-out of view like the original (which I didn’t discover until after several attempts at the mission). Also, it rains down a positive hail of laser fire while cloaked - in seconds I was destroyed without even seeing it

New tactics were required - one of the new Pirate behaviours in Elite Legend is to focus on dropped cargo and only taking the occasional potshot at you if you happen to cross their firing arcs. With this in mind I fitted the “System Discard Cargo” device to my Cobra Mk3, enabling me to drop some tasty loot to distract the greedy boys.

It worked! Although the initial approach still saw me down to my last energy bar, once I’d boosted past the three ships they continued on towards the dropped Food canisters (the cheapest item on the trading market ) - and by the time I’d looped around, my fast-charging Energy Unit had me back almost to full strength so I was able to quickly dispose of the Kraits. This was when I first saw the Asp blink into view. Managing to get a few hits on the vessel, it decided to spam a missile swarm at me (I glimpsed 4 incoming missiles before I hammered the ECM button) but after a bit more cargo distraction I was finally left with the desired scoopable canister and my list of ship equipment got a bit longer

Giving the Cloak a trial run in the next few interceptions shows it working differently than in original Elite - where if activated, attacking ships would immediately cease fire and assume a straight flying course - now by the looks of things ships continue to fire on you until you’ve managed to manoeuvre away from them. I’ll have to give it a bit more testing to be sure but this could be interesting new behaviour - and it’ll definitely change things for the Thargoid Station attack mission!

 

[Arioch]

Today I've discovered the reason for a couple of unexplained deaths over the past few weeks - my ship would be obliterated in seconds by an apparently invisible ship. I'd been toying with a pair of possible explanations:

• The Supernova mission had occurred 3 times in my current game, so perhaps this was the Cloaked Asp again?
• It was a bug.

Well, it turns out it was sorta the second one - but not a code bug, more of the human-shooting alien kind!

Since my Cobra Mk3 is now fitted with the Cloaking Device I was able to survive the initial withering laser fire - and the attacker's energy levels dropped enough for their cloak to start intermittently dropping at which point I quickly pressed record:

Source: https://youtu.be/d8ROvCy01II


(there's also some ship combat in this video showing some of the new pirate behaviour in Elite Legend - fighting among themselves and dropping/scooping cargo)

I've got the idea that there are a few different types of Thargoid in EL even though they all have the same model in game, though I've not seen anything to say so in the documentation or forum thread - the Cloaked Scout (I'm guessing a small ship due to it popping after only a short burst from my lasers), a stronger Thargoid that can take a lot more damage, and a stronger Thargoid that will deploy Thargons after taking a certain level of damage.

The last two may be the same vessel - I've seen that Boas and Anacondas will sometimes launch smaller ships, sometimes not.

 

[EliteMegaWeed]

This is the version of my full hearted intrigue, but because I just replayed Oolite Vanilla to 800 hits (over some two weeks), I just decided to leave it to better hands.

Highly respected OP Commander Arioch. Thanks for showing and making this star road as serious option. o7

 

[Captain Cordweller]

As someone who recently received a ZX Spectrum Next KS2 machine I have been poking around trying to acquire some of my favourite bits of 80s software.
Elite was always my favourite game and so was very excited by this russian port which is all I remember... AND MORE!
As a relatively Next newbie (not had my hands on a machine since the 90s), is there anyway to get Kempston (or other interface) joystick controls active?
I appreciate that this is still in development.

 

[Arioch]

As someone who recently received a ZX Spectrum Next KS2 machine I have been poking around trying to acquire some of my favourite bits of 80s software.
Elite was always my favourite game and so was very excited by this russian port which is all I remember... AND MORE!
As a relatively Next newbie (not had my hands on a machine since the 90s), is there anyway to get Kempston (or other interface) joystick controls active?
I appreciate that this is still in development.

I’m afraid I haven’t got the hardware to test (I’m using an emulator & gamepad) but the readme for the game says it should work with a joystick.

If the translation is correct, hold Left on the joystick on the initial game screen to select it. If you then freeze the game (Caps Shift) you can toggle between keyboard and joystick control with “K” - and there are other options there for inverting controls

 

[Arioch]

I'm still playing nearly every day and even though I've got to the sixth GalMap the game is presenting things I've not seen before - last session I was on a long-distance mission to deliver an experimental weapon and came across a pair of Fer de Lances waiting to pounce on any Fugitive CMDRs.

Thankfully my legal status was Squeaky Clean so I could use the encounter as a photo op

When I eventually got to my destination system something was noticably amiss on Station approach - the Coriolis was not rotating! This was something I'd seen before on my last playthrough of original Elite a few years ago: the original Speccy Elite had a "mission" where pirates had captured a space station - but there wasn't anything you could do about it so it was pretty much just an occasional random Game Over.

You could POKE the problem away or use the main menu load option to put you in the now pirate-free space station, but they were both fairly unsatisfying ways of dealing with the problem "mission" - and I noticed something different in Elite Legend: there was a Mamba flying around the stationary Station...

Mambas are only used by pirates so I thought there may be a new way of dealing with the mission: HOT LASER DEATH!!!

When I was awarded a credit bounty for the Mamba, I thought "I could be on to something here..."

After a few attempts at surviving the pirate fleet onslaught, I finally managed to beat the Pirate Mission

Source: https://youtu.be/g51hont9p0A

Awesome work by author PLM!

 

[Arioch]

Approximately 14 months into my current game and after my latest Right On Commander I have reached the lofty heights of the half-way point on the climb to Elite

Although I’ve tried to avoid mission spoilers with this modded 128k version I did see a translated forum post talking about Generation Ships and actually finding Raxxla - but I think they are things that require Elite ranking. The game is still managing to entertain and combat encounters remain varied - and Anarchies are still a “think twice” destination - so the journey there should be fun

 

[Markov Chaney]

I've only had a quick muck around so far, but Leesti Station is now a DODO (something the posh kids with BBC's previously had)

Hold on. So the 48k Spectrum port had less stuffs than the BBC 32k version? (inb4 yes I know there were Master and co-pro ("Tube") and floppy disk versions but the Dodo was in BBC B vanilla)

 

[Arioch]

Hold on. So the 48k Spectrum port had less stuffs than the BBC 32k version? (inb4 yes I know there were Master and co-pro ("Tube") and floppy disk versions but the Dodo was in BBC B vanilla)

Yup - the Torus devs who did the Speccy version basically had to write their own version of the game from scratch and ended up running out of time with what today we’d call “crunch” at the end of the dev year.

Also not all the ships on the identification chart could be in the same game - two of the ships (I think it was Mamba/Krait) were on opposite sides of the tape so you could only encounter one of them in a particular game session.

They wanted to include things like asteroid storms, generation ships, and black holes but they just didn’t have the time. At least one of those things is in Elite Legend and I wouldn’t be surprised if another is used to find Raxxla

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Approximately 14 months into my current game and after my latest Right On Commander I have reached the lofty heights of the half-way point on the climb to Elite
View attachment 382354
Although I’ve tried to avoid mission spoilers with this modded 128k version I did see a translated forum post talking about Generation Ships and actually finding Raxxla - but I think they are things that require Elite ranking. The game is still managing to entertain and combat encounters remain varied - and Anarchies are still a “think twice” destination - so the journey there should be fun

Aha, the beam laser up front. Not military laser?

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

Remlok! * SHUDDER *

 

[Arioch]

Aha, the beam laser up front. Not military laser?

It’s a Mk 2 beam laser so better than the old version, but I found the military lasers to be too fast at melting enemy ships - with the increased frame rate of this version I also found myself zapping dropped cargo pods before I could let go of the trigger. I still do with the Mk2 Beam, but only now and again - and every time I seem to do a Clarence Boddiker quote from Robocop (“You…you burned the %#&*ing money!”)
Edit: Actually, you’ve given me a ship outfitting thought - the Cobra can fit 4 different weapons (one for each “view”) and Elite Legend allows you to “rotate” the weapons. In practice it’s a bit like having fire groups; currently I’ve got a mining laser in the rear view and rotate it to the front when I see an asteroid. Now that I’m getting Thargoid invasion missions I might install a Military Laser to one of my spare slots and just use it when doing AX station attacks.

Remlok! * SHUDDER *

Thankfully I didn’t enjoy its tender mercies as I got Elite in the Supreme Challenge double tape box set

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about blatting cargo when not keeping trigger discipline.