Elite 1984 inspired you? 6502 anyone?
- Thread starter Wotthe Dickens
- Start date
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?
I became a space pilot went to explore the galaxy. :|
[hehe]
Wow, that's some mother in law
I know there's cheap kit to go vga2uhf but dunno the other way..
Don't forget that there maybe an RGB port. This was standard for the BBC Range of computers, in which case you can connect to a SCART socket. Either at video level, or RGB which in my mind would be most clearest as it raw and going through less processes to create a picture.
Kitty
Hehe. That's great. Glad you made it back ok. I remember tape cassettes being a pretty similar shape to a Cobra
wheeeeeee(Apologies if you're an astronaut for real)
+virtual rep
That's true- composite out maybe. Don't think my Atom has that though.
Oh yes, it inspired me.....
Into ZX Basic, then onto SBAS (RM 380Z!), Pascal, C, C++, Java, Oracle DBMS and I even did a couple of years of COBOL/DB2. I finished my IT career as a Senior Solutions Architect building payments products. Now in the commercial world but owe everything to that rubber-keyed Speccy.
Into ZX Basic, then onto SBAS (RM 380Z!), Pascal, C, C++, Java, Oracle DBMS and I even did a couple of years of COBOL/DB2. I finished my IT career as a Senior Solutions Architect building payments products. Now in the commercial world but owe everything to that rubber-keyed Speccy.
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Hehe. That's great. Glad you made it back ok. I remember tape cassettes being a pretty similar shape to a Cobra
(Apologies if you're an astronaut for real)
Sadly I sell tea.
So no apologies needed, but I also don't have the story you want to hear. Playing Elite back then just made me play all Elites that came out later, including this one.
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Sadly I sell tea.
No problem! Maybe your tea selling was subconsciously inspired by all the Elite trading
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Interesting thread.
Was I inspired to code by Elite? No, not really. Elite for me was one of those games coded by Wizards and Warlocks. I new I could never do that,
and still can't! No good at maths or PI (except Pukka).
I did learn to code by the excellent `Teach yourself to program` tutorials that came with the Vic20 and C64.
Mostly basic programming. I did `dabble` with machine code, 6502 or whatever it was. But taking three weeks of LDA, STA just to write your name
never really did it for me. I was destined to be a `print $string` kind of a guy.
Ironically leaving school at 16 in 1984 saw me working as a Distillery Operative and then a Warehouse man. I sort of drifted into IT
because no one else really understood computers. ICL UNIX svr4, DRS300 and 6000.
Now, some 30 odd years later I am a .Net, C# programmer (because after redundancy I decided to do something fun) with more languages under my belt than C3PO.
I write little solutions to the big problem that is SharePoint. If you think ED is bugged think again!
I put my meager success all down to Infocom and a small book called `Adventure Games` that taught me how to handle arrays.
Not to mention basic programmers who allowed me to CTRL+BREAK and LIST their code
Happy days.
SYS64738 (I can still remember that?)
Was I inspired to code by Elite? No, not really. Elite for me was one of those games coded by Wizards and Warlocks. I new I could never do that,
and still can't! No good at maths or PI (except Pukka).
I did learn to code by the excellent `Teach yourself to program` tutorials that came with the Vic20 and C64.
Mostly basic programming. I did `dabble` with machine code, 6502 or whatever it was. But taking three weeks of LDA, STA just to write your name
never really did it for me. I was destined to be a `print $string` kind of a guy.
Ironically leaving school at 16 in 1984 saw me working as a Distillery Operative and then a Warehouse man. I sort of drifted into IT
because no one else really understood computers. ICL UNIX svr4, DRS300 and 6000.
Now, some 30 odd years later I am a .Net, C# programmer (because after redundancy I decided to do something fun) with more languages under my belt than C3PO.
I write little solutions to the big problem that is SharePoint. If you think ED is bugged think again!
I put my meager success all down to Infocom and a small book called `Adventure Games` that taught me how to handle arrays.
Not to mention basic programmers who allowed me to CTRL+BREAK and LIST their code
Happy days.
SYS64738 (I can still remember that?)
Naaah,
it was adventure games for me - ZX81, Dragon 32, and the Dragon assembler was where I cut my teeth on 6809 coding....sadly the Dragon didn't really catch on (the £300 FDD didn't help<g>) so I moved to the C-64 and was amazed by the programmers reference manual that told you ALL sorts of stuff you didn't get with other PCs, and I discovered that 6502 (6510) code was a small subset of the 6809 I already new - like a RISC chip I guess.
Elite on C-64 was impressive, but by then I'd had my one and only game release (I'm a teacher these days, my games programming was a hobby during a career in the RAF) which one of my senior students found online and played to death a couple of months ago....unusual to have a fan 30 years down the line! I had rather more success with a stockmarket program in later years, but mostly I just program stiff to please myself - I get more fun from programming a handy routine in Voice Attack than I ever got from anything I ever actually sold.
I think the 80's made a big impact on many of us, and there were a bunch of games that did that - Elite was one, Lords of Midnight was another, Xcom yet another.....I honestly believe that games have improved over the years, but gameplay hasn't....the sound, graphics, interface, you name it, the whole set of features is infinitely improved these days, but the games are no more compulsive or addictive than Elite was 30 years ago. Go figure.
Dave
Edited to turn Bnig into big.
Oh, 6502/6510. 6809. Z80, 68000, 8808 (?) assembler (I wrote a 6502 assembler for a magazine at one point), Pascal, Fortran, C, C++, DCL. SQL, Visual this that and the other....the list goes on a bit....
it was adventure games for me - ZX81, Dragon 32, and the Dragon assembler was where I cut my teeth on 6809 coding....sadly the Dragon didn't really catch on (the £300 FDD didn't help<g>) so I moved to the C-64 and was amazed by the programmers reference manual that told you ALL sorts of stuff you didn't get with other PCs, and I discovered that 6502 (6510) code was a small subset of the 6809 I already new - like a RISC chip I guess.
Elite on C-64 was impressive, but by then I'd had my one and only game release (I'm a teacher these days, my games programming was a hobby during a career in the RAF) which one of my senior students found online and played to death a couple of months ago....unusual to have a fan 30 years down the line! I had rather more success with a stockmarket program in later years, but mostly I just program stiff to please myself - I get more fun from programming a handy routine in Voice Attack than I ever got from anything I ever actually sold.
I think the 80's made a big impact on many of us, and there were a bunch of games that did that - Elite was one, Lords of Midnight was another, Xcom yet another.....I honestly believe that games have improved over the years, but gameplay hasn't....the sound, graphics, interface, you name it, the whole set of features is infinitely improved these days, but the games are no more compulsive or addictive than Elite was 30 years ago. Go figure.
Dave
Edited to turn Bnig into big.
Oh, 6502/6510. 6809. Z80, 68000, 8808 (?) assembler (I wrote a 6502 assembler for a magazine at one point), Pascal, Fortran, C, C++, DCL. SQL, Visual this that and the other....the list goes on a bit....
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DogTailRed2 said:
It's amazing how bits lodge in the memory
I started the thread after a couple of glasses of wine and had come over all reminiscent but actually, it is interesting where our lives have led us since those early home computer days and having shared the initial Elite experience!
Thanks for sharing all your paths guys
(On the wine again, damn fine bottle this)
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Tell me about it. Sunday market (Jumpers for goal posts) I'd trot down with pocket money to the market stall in town where all the latest Spectrum, C64 and Atari games were proudly displayed like a Victorian butterfly collection, I clearly remember those Barbarian posters being especially prominently displayed.
"Got any Dragon games?" we'd say to the man sitting in his chair at the back always puffing nonchalantly on a cigarette looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.
"..in the box" he'd reply drawing in another puff, probably inspired slightly by the mention of dragons...
The small torn cardboard "Dragon 32 games" box of purgatory usually contained around 6 copies of identical Cuthbert games by Microdeal. If you were lucky a game proudly proclaimed "100% machine code" on the box like it deserved a flippin medal". I even brought home a copy of "Cheshire cat teaches maths" once out of pure desperation to experience any kind of binary based stimulus....but you'd never ever get a copy of Jet Set Willy, never.
Pick at random, hope for the best then return home to switch on the pre-tuned Dragon channel and optimistically type "CLOADM" and find that it wouldn't load because the game was written in Basic requiring you to type "CLOAD" on the Argos purchased third party tape recorder. Spend the rest of the weekend adjusting the tape heads, failing spectacularly to get it to load, read the inlay card anyway imagining it to be the best game ever written... return it to market next week and repeat the entire process.
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Dragon 32 didn't really do arcade, probably as much to do with the incredibly bad choice of colours (as usual for those days there was a number of colours v resolution tradeoff)- Dragon had a 4 colour set that went something like red, green, blue, yellow and an alternate set that went 'somewhat dodgy lilac, magenta seen through a rusty bucket, Disney mermaid tail cyan, and puke with veg removed off white/tan' - I always assumed the Dragon artistic director was colour blind. They had a damn good go at Star Wars once, but the games that were good on it were either the adventures - Madness and the Minotaur was my favourite, I played that loads, Black Sanctum was (I think) another, and the Air traffic control games that had you controlling lots of dots crossing the screen with gay abandon.
A shame really, the 6809 chip was really nice to program, I got half way through writing an adventure game writing package (rather like 'The Quill' of a bit later) when I realised that I was probably going to sell 20 copies even if I finished it.....
Dave
A shame really, the 6809 chip was really nice to program, I got half way through writing an adventure game writing package (rather like 'The Quill' of a bit later) when I realised that I was probably going to sell 20 copies even if I finished it.....
Dave
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Elite didn't inspire me, but I did start to learn programming this time last year (C++) and I absolutely love it. I was too young to even know what a computer game was when the original Elite came out. In fact I didn't even know Elite Dangerous existed until September last year when I saw it on Steam. I've been a mechanic for the last 12 years or so, and I'm hoping video game development will be my way out of the motor trade (I'm sick of it).
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I've nearly finished programming my own space invaders game using C++ and the win32 API. By the way if anybody reading this is interested in learning video game development, I highly recommend Game Institute. I mean, I don't have anything to compare it to, but I think it's a very good course. At one stage I didn't think I would ever be able to learn C++, but with (lots of) help from the people at Game Institute I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of C++ now, and it's improving all the time.
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I've nearly finished programming my own space invaders game using C++ and the win32 API. By the way if anybody reading this is interested in learning video game development, I highly recommend Game Institute. I mean, I don't have anything to compare it to, but I think it's a very good course. At one stage I didn't think I would ever be able to learn C++, but with (lots of) help from the people at Game Institute I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of C++ now, and it's improving all the time.
It's amazing how bits lodge in the memory
I started the thread after a couple of glasses of wine and had come over all reminiscent but actually, it is interesting where our lives have led us since those early home computer days and having shared the initial Elite experience!
Thanks for sharing all your paths guys
(On the wine again, damn fine bottle this)
And I am on the ciders
I did the 6502 thing too. It got me up and running and my first computer job. Not sure Elite inspired me as such in my career but it did inspire me to write a space trading and combat game in a 4GL language called Sculptor which I guess nobody remembers.The game was pretty cool actually AND it was multiplayer. Me and a colleague wrote it using the Sculptor report generating language
I drifted into Unix,in the early days. Started systems programming and administration with Olivetti 3B2 and Altos Unix /Xenix things. Became quite a serious Unix geek in the end. Then came Linux which was great for a while. I contributed to various projects including window managers and device drivers etc. Linux got dull when it got commercial but I moved into building solutions in high security environments. Fraud detection, digital signing, that kind of thing. Then I sold out and now run a team that does all the things I used to do and I have to pretend not to notice when they are getting all excited about something I KNOW won't work
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Enjoying your posts guys, thanks!
Coding has definitely provided for a fair few of us it seems, and yeah, although perhaps Elite '84 wasn't the pivotal point, it appeared at a point when coding as a career was becoming a possibility beyond the advanced mathematicians or academics.
It's interesting that coding had touched almost every industry over the years and although some coding is still pretty low level, we can now use high level tools to help us like unity and maybe in the future 'coding' in VR which could be interesting!
Coding has definitely provided for a fair few of us it seems, and yeah, although perhaps Elite '84 wasn't the pivotal point, it appeared at a point when coding as a career was becoming a possibility beyond the advanced mathematicians or academics.
It's interesting that coding had touched almost every industry over the years and although some coding is still pretty low level, we can now use high level tools to help us like unity and maybe in the future 'coding' in VR which could be interesting!
I started with an Atari 800 and Atari BASIC and thus began a life long love affair with computing . Moved to an Apple IIc where I first played Elite and after a couple of years moved on to an Amiga 500 and finally an IBM PC in the early 90's. I managed to get hired at Westwood studios in QA a few months before they released the Legend of Kyrandia. Worked on Dune II, Lands of Lore and The original Command and Conquer plus a few other projects. Fast forward to present day, I consult on virtualization projects(mostly citrix work) and of course game with my kids I've been known to tinker with Powershell for scripting and C# for admin tasks and as a hobby unreal engine. I still have not done a game jam but I am working towards doing one eventually.
I've been known to tinker with Powershell for scripting and C# for admin tasks and as a hobby unreal engine. I still have not done a game jam but I am working towards doing one eventually.
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Hehehe. Commiserations. I've spent quite a few years as a SharePoint specialist. Not so much the fluffy standard UI stuff. More coding to bend it into doing so many things that it was never intended to do.
I've been more info forms and workflows of late. Boring stuff, but pays the bills.