BBC Micro User : Guide to playing Elite

MikeSnos

MikeSnos
Following on from a recent find by Iain Norman, I was rummaging through the den this evening having a sort out etc and found the following gem amongst some of the papers!

Apparently, saving your game at regular intervals (see third image) was considered cheating! :eek:

Docking back then was difficult too apparently... Looks like things, for some at least, haven't changed.

The frustration this can cause has made many people throw away their copies of the game
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:eek: :D

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Finwolven

F
The referral to 'tedious at best' saving is for the sloooow data transfer of the day. You would either save the file on the tape deck which was horrifically slow, or to the disk, only slightly faster. The @ button allows you to 'save' into memory, without writing to disk.
 

Tar Stone

Banned
Tar Stone
There's something very, very nostalgic about seeing scans of old game magazine pages. It prompted me to Google 'Your Sinclair', which I read cover to cover every month for years, right up until it went out of print.

I was amazed to find all the issues online at ysrnry.co.uk, including page scans and covers.

It was a real joy spending an hour flicking through them.
 

hiasakite

H
I remember (and still have) the very same guide, which I used to get my head round Elite when I first started back in the 80's.
We only had a tape player, so saving was really tedious - the folks with discs had it far easier! (that said, the disc version on the beeb was 'much' superior...
 

littleminxundr

littleminxundr
hiasakite said:
I remember (and still have) the very same guide, which I used to get my head round Elite when I first started back in the 80's.
We only had a tape player, so saving was really tedious - the folks with discs had it far easier! (that said, the disc version on the beeb was 'much' superior...
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I remember that saving to tape on the Speccy was rather quick. The later Armstrads were even faster...
 

Witzo

Witzo
Wokawidget said:
Wonder if the author is playing ED :)
What?!...wait?!...rear view camera?! *shock horror*
You sure you're not trolling Mike? :p
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There were also port and starboard views, with a mount for a gun. I only ever placed one hit with a side gun; I wonder if side guns were useful for anyone.
 

Ike Thermite

I
Witzo said:
There were also port and starboard views, with a mount for a gun. I only ever placed one hit with a side gun; I wonder if side guns were useful for anyone.
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Side view was useful on the Beeb model B version as there was a credits exploit, if you bought and then sold Right Mining Lasers the refund was higher than the purchase price. My kid brother remembers me paying him the princely sum of 20p to do this a few hundred times. :)
 

Angus

Angus
Memnoch said:
Thanks Mike!

I liked the bit about saving the game being "tedious at best." How little we knew back then.
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But the option was only there when you were safely docked, right? That's my recollection of the C64 game anyway - on the BBC computer at work we just played it in the lunch hour basically as a shoot-em-up and didn't get into saving.

It was so cool. :)
 

Angus

Angus
Witzo said:
There were also port and starboard views, with a mount for a gun. I only ever placed one hit with a side gun; I wonder if side guns were useful for anyone.
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I used to sometimes have a mining laser on one side to vary my employment a bit, but also it was handy having something on the sides so that while you were racing back to port with a hull full of computers or whatever, you could monitor and take the precaution of targetting that mysterious flanking ship who may just turn out to be a threat.
 

Mecha

M
Witzo said:
There were also port and starboard views, with a mount for a gun. I only ever placed one hit with a side gun; I wonder if side guns were useful for anyone.
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Absolutely:)

They were invaluable for a skilled pirate - you could move up along side a larger slow moving trader, line it up in your sights, and then let rip! With prectice as they wallowed around trying to escape you could match their movements very accurately and keep shooting.
 

Steve50

Steve50
I will always remeber getting my 2nd copy of Elite, for my bday I got a Disk Drive, DFS upgrade (computer shop had to solder it inside) and a disk copy of Elite to go with my cassette version.

anyway, after getting home and being excited like a kid on xmas eve, a friend and I played for close to 8 hours straight as I wanted to start from scratch. at the end of that gaming session we tried to save and could not.. I was such a newbie to disk based games that it never occured to me that I'd need a blank disk to save my commander onto. for obvious reasons (obvious now, not obvious then) you couldn't save to the Elite disk.

and yes, I felt like an idiot ;)
 
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