Elite / Frontier When was Elite first playable on the BBC?

[Trickylion]

My tape developed a glitch in one block and had to be reloaded many times, there was some timer counter and if it failed to load in the time, then had to start again.
upgrading to floppy disc with missions and extra ships was immense. Mining was broken in the original with no asteroids, when they can they were irritating as the always came head onto the ship.
The beeb had a reset button next to the escape key. The ecape key launched the escape capsule, which you did manually prior to blowing up, to take you to the nearest station, thiswas quite a good feature, but many times I hit the reset reboot key instead, crashing the whole game, for another screechy upload.
There was some security feature, quoting letters from the manual and the goodies like the poster, novella and key template were excellent.
The later frontier versions were so buggy to be unplayable, The new game still retains frontier's panache for being buggy, having too many features, but ultimately it is so good, roll on exploring features and having a bit of thought before new features.
I dont have a cargo rack, so I cant take repair limpets, I cant harvest materials for heat sinks in the black, etc , etc

 

[Steve]

There was some security feature, quoting letters from the manual

Hmm, I don't remember that in the original game. I think that was Frontier Elite 2.

 

[BigF]

I played it on a friends BBC back in 84 not long after it came out, he'd bought it in WHSmiths, then just as soon as I could convince my mum to buy a 64 I bought it.

Played it till the tape wore out. Then in 1990 got hold of a BBC B and it came with the game so had that till Frontier came out.

Still to this day I have more hours and cash clocked in Frontier than ED, that's how much I played it I spent whole weeks off work playing it.

I would like to thank David and Ian as with out that original game I would probably not be working in the job I do now.

 

[Madmatt2002]

Hi all, I’m hoping this isn’t off thread too much, but I’m in desperate need to get my bbc up and running again. I turned it on for the first time in 29 years a year or so ago and got the dreaded capacitor burn on the power side, got a repair kit and all seems good, well power coming on, all the right ‘beeps’ as I remember them, but no picture at all. I’ve got an rgb converter cable so it should show on a non crt screen.
Does anyone know of a repair service for bbc’s And disk drives? I’m in Bedford.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Trickylion]

try elite with no TV screen blip blip, crash

 

[BigF]

You may find the rgb cable is to blame they dont always work on all screens.

Im an Amiga user so know this issue well. If you can find an old crt with composite input you may stand a chance.

Id try your local Freecycle or craigs list etc for where ever you are in the verse.

 

[Madmatt2002]

It’s not the cable, I bought one for converting to led and sent it back when there was no picture, it was tested and found ok so must be an internal bbc problem

 

[BigF]

So your only option to prove the BBC is at fault is to test it on an old monitor. Before you spnd cash getting it "fixed" or replaced.

Lcd convertor cables are notorious for not working on sone systems and then ok on others.

I have a decoder box that allows me to custom tune the out put to the LCD, i use this to send the output to vga and even then, there are several aplications that just wont play ball.