Wow!!.. I need a bigger Hard Drive..

[Boxxer]

The year was 1980... I bought my first computer... a Sinclair Z80.. It had 1k, (yes ONE K) of ram. Then I acquired a Vic20 with 8mb of ram … A year later I bought my dream machine, a 32mb BBC B Micro.
The first game I played on this was 'Chuckie Egg', loaded from tape.. Another year on and after an upgrade of 64megabytes of sideways ram plus a 1770 disc controller, courtesy of a now defunct company called 'Solidisk', I bought a floppy disc drive. Having mastered BBC basic, I was writing my own programs...

Then in 1984 it arrived with a bang.. ELITE... Forget Pac Man, Space Invaders, et al..
This was the game home computers where made for.. Those of you that played it know what I mean. It had everything. Black & white Vector graphics, Stars, trading, stars, more trading and more stars, police vipers, pirates, oh and Thargoids.. Not forgetting the space stations.. I played it almost non-stop, much to the dismay of my wife...

Fast forward 35 years, my rug-rats have grown, married and have rug-rats of their own... My beautiful wife has gone to the other place... Now I'm back in this iteration of the Elite franchise...

Having played this game now for almost two years, with my PC hooked up to my 50inch plasma TV, I thought the graphics couldn't get any better... How wrong I was...

My son-in-law showed me his VR set-up, playing some silly zombie First person shooter on his PS4... I thought to myself, I bet ED would look good in VR.. So as a retirement gift for myself, (I'm 67 btw), I upgraded my rig with a 1080ti graphics card and a Vive VR...
First thing I realised after strapping on my own personal "Face Hugger", was that I couldn't see my keyboard. Not being a "touch typist" with all the keys needed to play the game, this just wouldn't work..
So I bought an X56 Rhino Hotas.. and installed the excellent "Voice Attack" software... Now we're cooking...

But then 'Beyond' chapter 4 beta dropped..

So as to not give myself a "spoiler", I played a bit in the 'beta' on my TV... While waiting for it to go 'Live', I hatched some Dinosaurs in Frontiers "Jurassic Evolution"...

Real life called, it being Christmas my Grand rug-rats had to have my full attention.

Two days ago, I logged into ED for the first time in VR... OMG !!!!

With my hands on my Hotas, and my Voice Attack crew set-up, I really felt like a Space Pilot... This is as close as I'll ever get to actually being "out there".... The immersion took my breath away... Hence the title of this opus...
I've taken so many screenshots of the ED Galaxy I fear for the capacity of my hard-drive.

I'm on my way to Beagle Point and last night I came across this system, RHUEDGU GW-L D8-49 in the Ryker's Hope Sector.. Is this a record I wonder, it is for me.

103 Stellar Bodies + 22 Asteroid Clusters
3 Suns
13 Gas Giants
16 High Metal Content Worlds
1 Metal Rich Body
12 Rocky Bodies
56 Ice Bodies
1 Water world and 1 Earth-like
54 of which are land-able.
'A 10' an Ice Planet, had Void Opal hotspots in its rings!! I had to laugh, thinking how was I going to get them out..

It took me almost 5 hours to fully scan the system.. I must learn to limit my sight seeing...

Sorry I can't supply a screenshot, I haven't worked out how to do that yet..

Anyway... thank you for reading this 'wall of words'. I'm off to do some exploring..

I just wish I was 35 years younger, who knows what the next generation will see in gaming.. Holographic games maybe, just imagine ED like that... WOW !!!!

Fly safe commanders, and enjoy this beautiful game.

 

[Enderby]

Lovely!! Enjoy!

 

[Ashnak]

Great find.

And EDSM doesn't know of this system yet. So there are two possibilities:
a) you're the first CMDR to find that system or
b) you made some error when typing in that system name

Since you seem to be playing on a PC (VR is rather limited otherwise...), you could consider getting an EDSM account and run one of the EDSM feeder programs, like EDMC or EDDiscovery. The latter also serves as a fully automatic logbook, while EDSM (with an acount) can keep track of your travels and show them to you on a nice map. There are reasons to not install these apps - the two main ones beeing that you'll have to give them some credentials (at least EDDiscovery needed them before 3.3) and that, if you're trading, you'll habd out the trade data to everyone who wants to look them up on e.g. eddb, possibly ruining a profitable trade route.

 

[Arubeto]

Thanks a lot for sharing those beautiful memories!

 

[the100thmonkey]

Then I acquired a Vic20 with 8mb of ram … A year later I bought my dream machine, a 32mb BBC B Micro.

Kilobytes! Those machines had kilobytes of RAM!

 

[Siobhan]

Kilobytes! Those machines had kilobytes of RAM!

Quite so... Personally had a ZX81, the 80's successor, and went straight from there to the BBC B, also with floppy drive obtained pretty much for Elite. Didn't play any FE2 or FFE since I wasn't on the Amiga/PC upgrade path (Archimedes family). Still can't afford VR though... maybe in a year or two...assuming we still have electricity.

 

[Burke]

Hey boxer.....Remember citadel? "citadel citadel superior software presents citadel" First time i ever heard a computer speak sent me running from the room shouting its talking its talking.

 

[Eukanuba23]

Kilobytes! Those machines had kilobytes of RAM!

Exactly! It will never stop blowing my mind how much the scale of computer performance has increased. I used to have a Commodore 64 with 64KB of RAM and a 0.5Mhz processor. I lusted after the Amiga 500, which had a 7Mhz CPU and 512KB of RAM.

The 512KB RAM expansion for the Amiga cost about £200 in 1987 or so. Today, I have a machine that is ostensibly a telephone that cost £150, has a 1.4Ghz CPU, 3GB RAM and 32GB of solid state storage. It has a 128GB memory card inside it that cost £25 and is many, many times faster than the RAM in the Amiga.

As for my actual computer, I sometimes open up Task Manager and simultaneously run many high intensity programs and marvel at it not maxing anything out. There's very little practical use to running Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer at the same time, but it's fun if you like looking at graphs and big numbers.

 

[Burke]

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/

8 track tapes? omg!

 

[Apsley]

Loved your post OP!

I started Elite on my mates BBC B, before I got my Spectrum. I have recently got a vive too. It is astonishing.

I too sometimes find myself pondering what the next 30 years will bring! It will be fun, I'm sure.

Aps.

 

[Frank]

Back in the Eighties when Elite first came out I said to myself "Wow, this is just like being in a spaceship", and then when Elite: Dangerous came out supporting VR I said to myself "Wow, this is just like being in a spaceship" <grin>

Welcome to the best Elite experience possible. There are quite a few of us now who wouldn't play the game any other way.

 

[Speedy O]

Oh, you’re gettin’ rep OP.


Thanks.

 

[Chris Simon]

103 Stellar Bodies + 22 Asteroid Clusters
3 Suns
13 Gas Giants
16 High Metal Content Worlds
1 Metal Rich Body
12 Rocky Bodies
56 Ice Bodies
1 Water world and 1 Earth-like
54 of which are land-able.
'A 10' an Ice Planet, had Void Opal hotspots in its rings!! I had to laugh, thinking how was I going to get them out..

WOW

 

[Wosthisdo]

Ha! Only 2 years younger than the OP. My route was Heathkit, Vic 20, BBC B. The 2 things I remember most from the original Elite are: 1) shooting through the space-station from the back to kill police as they came out to get you (and then running far). 2) With the military laser, if you could get the 1 pixel (distant) enemy square in your sights that was a sure kill with no risk.

I still get a buzz from the current game loading screen as at the time I had an amber monochrome monitor

 

[CMDR NightsLong]

Thank you for sharing, I'm really happy you could got to experience this, it is amazing.

Remember if you get motion sick stop using the VR straight away and go back to TV, monitor otherwise it could last for hours after you stop, but not everyone is susceptible to it, apart from that enjoy.

o7 <3 fly safe, don't let the space madness get you out there (keep tin foil hat nearby).

 

[verminstar]

Repped fer the trip down the memory lane...I remember Tapper and Jet set willy as life changing events that coincided with teenage hormones and rebellion. Tis easy to dismiss the wonders of gaming today when ye can sit here and say ye remember where it all began...an entertaining story, thanks fer sharing that ^

 

[kilvenny]

Golden oldie Spectrum player here. Chuckie Egg - I remember well, first game I played that I reached a point that I could never die on. Jet Set - I remember well especially the toilet flush at the end. Glad you are enjoying VR and have the time to enjoy it.

 

[Boxxer]

Oops !! My bad.. you're right, they were kilobyte computers.. Fat finger syndrome or my memory banks need an overall..
My Granddaughter would just shake her head and say "it's the latter, but then you are old"..

Citadel, I remember.. that and 'Repton'(1,2,and 3).. 'Sentinel' was another favourite.. so many in fact.. but nothing came close to Elite.

Ah, the one pixel 'one-shot', I remember once trying that for a while, wondering why it didn't work... until I realised my target was a distant space station..
My (then) six year old son's laughter is still ringing in my ears... Thankyou for reminding me..

Btw.. The mentioned system is as typed, I took a detour to Colonia, well 97 jumps backwards, mostly with Neutron assisted Jumponium,
(which was harrowing in VR for the first few times anyway) to sell my data. I got almost 300 million credits, 13,590,000 for that system alone !!!
It now shows as 'First discovered and First Scanned' by me.. and that my friends is the last time I will ever check to see if I got 'First' anything..

It matters not to me, or the credits really. I have almost 9 Billion anyway..
It is to quote "not about the destination, it's the journey that matters"...

Thankyou all for your reply's.. Respect..

 

[xxThe_Dice_manxx]

Great post op.

Does anyone remember Star Trader which was on the soft aid bundle? Loved that game.

Yeah beeb speccy and my own Com64 those were the days , my fav version of elite was on the Atari st.

 

[Demascus]

Am I in time in hear grandpas holiday story of something that happened sometime way back when? I'll get the tea on.