Elite 1984 inspired you? 6502 anyone?

Wotthe Dickens

Wotthe Dickens
I'm curious if many cmdrs were inspired by the original 1984 Elite to make their own games or get into a career of coding!
I was a budding 6502 coder when I saw Elite, and it certainly influenced me!
All these years later and I'm a teacher and a coder by profession, although the tools are somewhat more helpful nowadays :)
I also like the fact that mobile gaming has allowed small time coders to be successful as well as the 100's strong big studios.

Was your career in part inspired by Elite? :)
 
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Frank

Frank
My version of Elite came on the Sinclair Spectrum. It was Z80 Assembler for me. I did a bit of 6502 coding when I was mucking about with an old Apple, but I preferred the fancy instruction set of the Z80.

I could see how the more limited instruction set could lead to RISC ships though, for people with more organized minds than mine. I never did anything more than write a couple of games for my own amusement though... coding made my brane hurt.
 

CMDR Heisenberg B. Damned

CMDR Heisenberg B. Damned
Yeah, I remember turning up at my Aunties with the spectrum and her favorite game (breakout). Well the case for breakout which didn't have the tape in it! So I programmed a simple breakout game in an hour or two [wacko]

If I had any financial sense I could probably have made a load of cash out of it. I did have some friends who sold their games just never got round to it myself. Still tinker with game engines now (Unity mainly) still find it fun.
 
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twelvebore

T
Yep I was a 6502 addict back then. I even disassembled and printed out the whole of the Acornsoft Defender clone, to figure out how to write games! Wrote some games to pay my way through University. Moved on to ARM assembler when the Archimedes came out.

I still spend most of my day coding, though formally speaking I'm employed as an astronomer.
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
Yup, another 6502 coder here (even had the 6502 2nd processor for my BBC which meant I could have a coloured radar).

6502SecondProcessor.jpg

I don't know if I was directly influenced by Elite (I was already well into assembly language programming) but I was certainly inspired by it and by seeing what was possible, even with so little memory. My BSc final year project was entirely written in 6502 assembler (a graphical emulation of a 4 bit microprocessor which you could zoom in on, right down to the logic gate level) and that in turn led on to my career as a computer programmer (which I still do to this day).
 

Varrag

Varrag
Yeah, original Elite was partially responsible for my interest in Z80 machine code, which I was learning quite pationately back then. My friend and I were creating strategy game much like Tobruk on ZX Spectrum, just on bigger scrollable map and with more varied units, and managed to go quite far with it.

However, somewhere along the line we discovered bikes, cars and girls so we got distracted and eventually ended up in totally different professions than programming :)
 

drew

drew
Wotthe ens said:
I'm curious if many cmdrs were inspired by the original 1984 Elite to make their own games or get into a career of coding!
I was a budding 6502 coder when I saw Elite, and it certainly influenced me!
All these years later and I'm a teacher and a coder by profession, although the tools are somewhat more helpful nowadays :)
I also like the fact that mobile gaming has allowed small time coders to be successful as well as the 100's strong big studios.

Was your career in part inspired by Elite? :)
Click to expand...

In short, yes! I had the ZX Spectrum version of Elite.

I learnt in order:

Spectrum BASIC
Z80A Assembly
Pascal / Modula-2
68000 Assembly
C
Java
C++
C#

I am now head of IT Security for a major London firm and write the occasional book in my spare time. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
 

ZeeWolf

ZeeWolf
I heard about Elite when we had a Dragon 32, even the other format magazines used to rave about it. Will we get Elite on the Dragon, is this Elite on the Dragon? You couldn't pick up a computer magazine in the UK around the mid-80's without some letters page or article which mentioned it and every other game was trying to aspire to.

When we finally upgraded to a second hand Amstrad CPC 464 there was a "gold edition" copy of Elite in the box of games. Obviously it stood out like a sore thumb as everything else was in a small jewel case box. Although we weren't allowed the computer until Christmas my Brother and I pinched the Elite manual/s and read it over and over. The entire manual just read like it was pulled from the future but it was funny too. When we finally got to play Elite on Christmas morning I was amazed seeing planet Lave for the first time because I'd never seen a computer render a filled circle that fast! Compared to everything else that was around during the 8-bit era it felt epic, 3-dimensional and involved in a way that required you to come back and continue your progress. It wasn't until somewhere in the 16-bit era that I feel that kind of thing became the norm.

I got my degree in computer science & artificial intelligence and joined Codemasters for a while back around 2000. There were more than a few Elite inspired programmers there. Even after leaving games for the "real" world I met lots of people that talked about Elite, even one guy quite high up in a multi-national once walked into my office and saw some guys playing a game and proclaimed "There was only ever one game I ever played, Elite on the Speccy!".

I don't think Bell & Braben's contribution to gaming should be understated. It can't be a coincidence that Chris Roberts the other big space games maker came from the BBC stable too. Then you have people like Jez San and the team at Argonaut and everything they did to teach Nintendo 3D programming and brought us Starfox and the "Super FX" chip, maybe it's just a coincidence that Jez had a small consulting role on the C64 version of Elite? Then there are all the developers and producers that directly reference Elite as inspiration for X, Eve, GTA and now No Man's Sky.
 
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halcyon

H
Ah the memories

Started with a 6800 - yep not a typo 6800, built it from a design from the Amateur Computer Club, 256 bytes of ram, no eprom or keyboard or display, programmed using toggle switches on the address and data lines with 8 leds on the output port pins.

Taught me a lot about coding and hardware (Still have my bible at the time the Scelbi 6800 Cookbook kicking about somewhere along with boxes of Byte magazine and other assorted American journals).

Then built a Nascom1 from a kit, Z80 based and programmed rtty and morse decoders etc to go with the amateur radio hobby I was into.
When I got the BBC Micro I wrote a weather satellite decoder and spent hours waiting for Noaa and Meteor satellites to pass, this at the time when weather forecasts consisted of Michael Fish sticking his cloud pictures on a map of the uk not a satellite photo to be seen.

I did the same when the Amiga500 came along with its much higher resolution display even sold a few copies of the weather sat. software.
Dot matrix printers were the height of luxury but useless for recording pictures so I took photo's of the screen using 35mm camera and developed and printed them in the works social club darkroom.

I joined BT and it all went downhill, my exciting life of a realtime software engineer was replaced with relays and electromagnets and light bulbs :)

Happy days :)
 

Kitty

Kitty
For me it was Z80 Assembler on the Z80, then 6502 and 65C02 Assembler on the BBC A, B, 2nd processor. To be very honest, I used to hack various Beeb games to make them work using a disc drive for faster loading. Later on I re-wrote part of the OS to make it much faster using the 65C02 and enhanced instruction set, whilst also using the "un-authorized" or "undocumented" instruction set on both 6502 and 65C02 to make stuff run faster.

Split screen programming was my thing with I think Modes 1 and 3 intermixed from memory; would need to dig out my documentation for that to verify. I also wrote a complete Bulletin Board System for Radio Hams on 2m using the cassette port to produce the right tones for coding over the air together with Morse code transmission from the beeb, again using the cassette port, which was a requirement for a server/repeater ident.

Pascal, Forth, Fortran, C, C++, C#, ipx86, Java are languages to name a very small amount of my repertoire, then of course there is XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and now of course HTML5, but I don't do these any more. Python, Lua, Javascript, VBScript I have also have plenty of experience with.

Currently, when not playing Elite, (which exploration is taking a huge chunk of my time), I am writing a DXD Engine using C, interfacing with Lua for the scripting side. This will then be used for examining a new method of AI written in C++, which is a self evolving new type of neural network, (hush hush of course). It is all my own work and ideas and one day, I may publish something about it for others to take up mission.

I am essentially self taught with all languages, just referring to manuals when I get stuck on sort of syntax or knowledge about some obscure object. Programming has always been a male orientated subject, and when I first started out, I couldn't get any kind of job with computers, so I had to work my way in through the back door. It is still hard to get a job even these days, and even more so when you are disabled.

Sadly these days, I take quite a few strong painkillers, that turns my brain to mush, so my programming is very limited at the moment.

The older you get, the more experience you gain, so if it looks as if I have done a lot of stuff, it is because I am a dinosaur.


My favourite will always be 6500 family assembler. I used to dream code in those days.

K
 

CMDR Heisenberg B. Damned

CMDR Heisenberg B. Damned
Kitty said:
For me it was Z80 Assembler on the Z80, then 6502 and 65C02 Assembler on the BBC A, B, 2nd processor. To be very honest, I used to hack various Beeb games to make them work using a disc drive for faster loading. Later on I re-wrote part of the OS to make it much faster using the 65C02 and enhanced instruction set, whilst also using the "un-authorized" or "undocumented" instruction set on both 6502 and 65C02 to make stuff run faster.

Split screen programming was my thing with I think Modes 1 and 3 intermixed from memory; would need to dig out my documentation for that to verify. I also wrote a complete Bulletin Board System for Radio Hams on 2m using the cassette port to produce the right tones for coding over the air together with Morse code transmission from the beeb, again using the cassette port, which was a requirement for a server/repeater ident.

Pascal, Forth, Fortran, C, C++, C#, ipx86, Java are languages to name a very small amount of my repertoire, then of course there is XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and now of course HTML5, but I don't do these any more. Python, Lua, Javascript, VBScript I have also have plenty of experience with.

Currently, when not playing Elite, (which exploration is taking a huge chunk of my time), I am writing a DXD Engine using C, interfacing with Lua for the scripting side. This will then be used for examining a new method of AI written in C++, which is a self evolving new type of neural network, (hush hush of course). It is all my own work and ideas and one day, I may publish something about it for others to take up mission.

I am essentially self taught with all languages, just referring to manuals when I get stuck on sort of syntax or knowledge about some obscure object. Programming has always been a male orientated subject, and when I first started out, I couldn't get any kind of job with computers, so I had to work my way in through the back door. It is still hard to get a job even these days, and even more so when you are disabled.

Sadly these days, I take quite a few strong painkillers, that turns my brain to mush, so my programming is very limited at the moment.

The older you get, the more experience you gain, so if it looks as if I have done a lot of stuff, it is because I am a dinosaur.


My favourite will always be 6500 family assembler. I used to dream code in those days.

K
Click to expand...

:eek: One word...

[video=youtube;5ntPN3v0dTI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ntPN3v0dTI[/video]
 

DragoonKnight

DragoonKnight
Wotthe ens said:
I'm curious if many cmdrs were inspired by the original 1984 Elite to make their own games or get into a career of coding!
I was a budding 6502 coder when I saw Elite, and it certainly influenced me!
All these years later and I'm a teacher and a coder by profession, although the tools are somewhat more helpful nowadays :)
I also like the fact that mobile gaming has allowed small time coders to be successful as well as the 100's strong big studios.

Was your career in part inspired by Elite? :)
Click to expand...

I never heard of Elite until Elite Dangerous, but I do remember writing code in 6502 assembly back in high school..... I was quite excited to learn assembly back then as my previous programming experience was limited to basic and pascal
 

William J Smith

William J Smith
It was coding on a ZX81 that started me off, then learnt Z80 before elite came out, played that for a bit and returned to doing animation timing loops in z80 using interuppts, music code was fun too..

Ended up programming industrial robots for a living. (i hate it).... took time out to create a program for uploading/downloading data to the robots from a pc on the RS232 port (they all use custom protocols)

And now.. full circle... back playing elite (although a much better version) [cool]

Bill
 
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