I can't say Elite was my sole inspiration for getting into IT, but I played it for many hours on my ZX Spectrum at the time. Other than typing in BASIC listings on a friends ZX81, I did learn BASIC on my Spectrum and that probably was my first development experience. Since then I've gone through AM on OS/2, Powerbuilder, PL/SQL, C/C++, HTML/Javascript, and since 1997 been doing Java.
Elite 1984 inspired you? 6502 anyone?
- Thread starter Wotthe Dickens
- Start date
Nice
There's a certain satisfaction in coding for sure. I paint as well as code and I find there's similar creative processes at work. I code, stand back and look at what I've done, get back in there and fiddle, repeat. When complete, I feel it isn't, or at least that there's places I could improve next time
Thanks for your posts guys.
6502? My weapon of choice was the wonderful Z80.
And what a terrific thread it's turned out to be, some fascinating insights, thanks to everyone for sharing.
Not exactly on 6502 topic but somebody mentioned that their early coding was centered around the process of transferring BBC micro games from tape to disc, a process that was often uncharitably described as "software piracy" and one that was very dear to my own heart back in those days.
Well anyway, I thought I'd share my own particular, somewhat radical, breakthrough in this area which served me extremely well from it's "invention", pretty much up until the end of my years of BBC gaming.
Essentially it was centered around the fact that when you pressed the Break key on the Beeb it triggered a 6502 hardware interrupt which essentially paused the entire CPU, and when you released the Break key it triggered a JMP to a particular address in the OS. So what I did was to fit my OS into a ZIF socket ..
I then coded and burnt myself a new OS chip (which I childishly entitled HackOS) that replaced the code at the aforementioned address with code that dumped the entire contents of memory to a bank of "sideways" RAM (I suppose an early "hibernation" file if you will).
With the original OS in place I'd load up the game from tape and get it to the "Press SPACEBAR to play" point, then press and hold Break, pop open the ZIF socket, replace Beeb OS with HackOS, lock the new chip back in and then release the Break key again. The 6502 would jump to my oo code and bingo! complete dump of the in-memory game, all primed and ready to run. Save that to a floppy disc and Bob's yer uncle.
Almost certainly used that to create a
Ahhhh, happy days
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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?
+Rep.
I was already working next door to Acorn's north west HQ selling the BBC b and every peripheral you could possibly get for it when we were asked to test this new game they were about to release. Took us about two hours to discover the Torch Z80 dual drive system could copy the disk's with no trouble - sorry Dave but your anti-piracy measures sucked!
I was already eyeballs deep in 6502 and Z80 by this time but seeing the galaxy on a 5.25 floppy and then on a 3.5 just blew my mind and only increased my resolve to have a career in computing. 32 Years later and I have no regrets, I've worked on some great projects and some absolute lemons that best remain in the past and forgot by all of us!
Yes, but not something I persued later on in life.
- Learned to code in Z80
- Learned how to optimise Z80 code (T states .. eugh!)
- Wrote some routines in assembly for spirte handling (ZX Spectrum) and interrupt handling.
- Helped write some games (ZX Spectrum)
- Helped publish these games (which are still available today on the Internet and no - I am not going to say which
)- Left coding to persue a different direction.
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Funnily enough only last week I chucked-out 4 blank EPROMs that had somehow remained in my components rack since my BEEB days.
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Duuude.. I wanna be you..
Nooooo...
I still have all of mine, and also a number of piggy backed 8K static ram chips that were plugged into a sideways eprom board so I could load up sideways roms into them for development purposes. Much easier to change static ram, then keep erasing/ burning eproms.
The best parts about the beeb, were the 1MHz Bus and Tube. I used to hook up my own 65c02 based processor card on these to develop controller applications for robotics for the company I used to work for. Those were by far the best years of my life.
Oh, good old 6502 and the first games I've played - at the same time learning to code. All the line with all derivatives of II+/IIE/IIc and later their soviet "analogs" on all levels. But it's not elite that was the most inspirational for me - rather the game mentioned in my avatar. Case of hobby becoming a profession. Result - my work was always (and is up to now) in relation with automatisation in research in various domains of fundamental physics.
Yep, Elite definitely inspired me to become a coder.
If anyone is nostalgic for 'good old 8 bit' coding, can I recommend Pico 8 to you? One of its motivations is to make "grumpy old programmers" happy again. It's deliberately limited to encourage creativity, which I find stimulates me to do little throwaway projects (games for my children, I managed to bash out a Happy Chicken game shown in an episode of Peppa Pig before the episode was over), but there are also some seriously polished efforts coming out, and it encourages the 'pinch the good bits' kind of code sharing we had back in the day.
If anyone is nostalgic for 'good old 8 bit' coding, can I recommend Pico 8 to you? One of its motivations is to make "grumpy old programmers" happy again. It's deliberately limited to encourage creativity, which I find stimulates me to do little throwaway projects (games for my children, I managed to bash out a Happy Chicken game shown in an episode of Peppa Pig before the episode was over), but there are also some seriously polished efforts coming out, and it encourages the 'pinch the good bits' kind of code sharing we had back in the day.
That's pretty hardcorehttp://images.core-electronics.com....2fb58b1/2/8/28-pin_zif_socket__ada382__01.jpg
I then coded and burnt myself a new OS chip (which I childishly entitled HackOS)
Ahhhh, happy days
I like the hardware software mixThanks Bran!
You're very mysterious Liqua - I have images of some undercover governmental agency or arms smuggling
(no offence, I like the mystery!)Over the years, I've managed to bring my hoarding under control, just the Acorn Atom, the Beeb and a bunch of tapes from that era!
Awww, there's plenty left
Cool
Thanks everyone for sharing, hehe, lots of interesting paths we weave.
I started on a TI 99/4A, using the built-in Basic parser. I must have been about 7 years old. It took a solid week for me to figure out that when the manual said "run the program" I was supposed to enter RUN. I'd spend hours typing in hundreds of lines of code and didn't know how to get it to run! And early on we didn't have a tape drive, just the cartridge slot, so every time I turned it off I lost everything. Over the next few years we got that tape drive and I also started typing in more complex programs from the back of Compute! magazine. By the time I was 10 I knew I didn't want to be a full time coder
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The BBC Micro and Elite absolutely inspired me to program, particularly the graphics side of things.
When I hit 30, after 10 years in 'normal' IT I decided to put a demo reel together and sent it off to Codemasters. They eventually offered me a job but the pay was terrible! If I was still 21 and happy to sleep in a barn, maybe
anyways from 2000'ish I present Procedural Planet!
[video=youtube_share;xCn_eW3w74c]https://youtu.be/xCn_eW3w74c[/video]
and from 2006, my only published work
[video=youtube_share;2dUL3vjSgPk]https://youtu.be/2dUL3vjSgPk[/video]
Since then it's all down hill [haha]
When I hit 30, after 10 years in 'normal' IT I decided to put a demo reel together and sent it off to Codemasters. They eventually offered me a job but the pay was terrible! If I was still 21 and happy to sleep in a barn, maybe
anyways from 2000'ish I present Procedural Planet!
[video=youtube_share;xCn_eW3w74c]https://youtu.be/xCn_eW3w74c[/video]
and from 2006, my only published work
[video=youtube_share;2dUL3vjSgPk]https://youtu.be/2dUL3vjSgPk[/video]
Since then it's all down hill [haha]
I had a mate with a TI994a and I was jealous of the cartridge gamesI started on a TI 99/4A, using the built-in Basic parser.
....By the time I was 10 I knew I didn't want to be a full time coder
...and lol, at least you found out at 10!
Nice vids
yeah, graphics have been my thing since I figured out how to poke pixels 
I remember I loved Elite so much on my C64 that I was afraid my game floppy would get corrupted and I wouldn't able to play anymore. Since I couldn't run from a copy because of copy protection, I learned 6502 assembly so I can walk through the code and disable the copy protection so I can run the game from a backup floppy.
I still play a coder occasionally when I can sneak in some coding between "system design".
I still play a coder occasionally when I can sneak in some coding between "system design".
Thanks everyone for posting - reps all round
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?
Sadly not. I first programmed on the ZX81 back in 1982. I started out by looking at the BASIC book that came with the computer and typing in listings from magazines like Your Sinclair and picked it up from there.