Elite / Frontier ArcElite ship info

madbilly · Apr 15, 2017

Hi all,

I'm working on a little fan project and I'm looking for info on the ships in ArcElite, like speed, hit points, etc. Like what Quelo shared for Amiga Elite. I know about the datacards but I'm after more detail than this. Does anyone have this kind of info?

Cheers

madbilly · Apr 17, 2017

Okay, doesn't look like anyone knows. I looked at the executable in a Hex Editor, and used an online disassembler, but couldn't see anything obvious. I also looked at a few of the other files in the game but still nothing obvious. It must be in there somewhere, does anyone have any idea what to look for in ARMv2 object code? I assume it would be stored in a data structure but I don't know how that would appear in the executable.

gunbladelad · Apr 17, 2017

You need to give people on this section more than a couple of days - some people only check in every week or so.

Sadly I personally don't have the information you're wanting, but hopefully you'll get the information you're wanting soon enough.

madbilly · Apr 17, 2017

gunbladelad said:
You need to give people on this section more than a couple of days - some people only check in every week or so.

Sadly I personally don't have the information you're wanting, but hopefully you'll get the information you're wanting soon enough.

Yep you're right, this section of the forums is very quiet now. But not as quiet as alt.fan.elite!

Koen · Jul 17, 2017

I guess this might be what you are looking for:

Archimedes Elite ships C source code on Ian Bell's home page.

madbilly · Jul 17, 2017

Hi Koen,

Thanks for your reply and the suggestion. Unfortunately that's not quite what I'm after - at least I don't think it is. Those sources are the 3D models, which are cool but not what I'm looking for. What I'd like to find are the ship stats. I've managed to find out from extensive web searching that each ship has at least the following stats: shield strength, max turn rate, max velocity, max cargo and ECM y/n. And I've found a useful online tool to disassemble the executable and look inside, but there's no way I know to work out which parts of the file are ship data or which bits relate to which stats. I'm aware that this is kind of activity is frowned upon in these forums so I don't want to do anymore of this kind of digging.

I tried to contact a few people who've worked on the game, cheats and conversions over the years but I haven't found anyone who knows, or at least is willing to tell me. I even contacted Clive Gringras to ask him! He didn't reply, probably cos he's too busy and/or my email went to junk.

In short, I've run into a bit of a dead end, which is a shame for my ED-fan project but I'll just have to continue without the ArcElite ships

Thanks again for trying help. If you've got any other ideas then please share!

Cheers

Zieman · Jul 17, 2017

I don't think debugging/disassembling old games is really frowned upon. What's frowned upon is file-digging to spoil E: D puzzles.

madbilly · Jul 18, 2017

Zieman said:
I don't think debugging/disassembling old games is really frowned upon. What's frowned upon is file-digging to spoil E: D puzzles.

Well, perhaps not, but in case I didn't find what I was looking for. I will look again at some point and see if I have any new ideas. If I could find anything that would decompile back to C instead of ARM assembler then that might help. (I know that decompiling isn't magic, but it could still make the result more readable than assembler).