Last night I went up to the loft and had a good rummage to find this:
I obviously had a later version of Elite. I was aware of it for ages before I got it - friends had it on the BBC first I think. This gold edition didn't have the Lensloc but I did have that for another game. I'm guessing I got it at age 12/13 when it was 4/5 years old (I'm a 76 baby).
Anyway I also dug out my old Speccy 128k. I thought what better than to try to load the 80s Elite on 80s hardware as a tribute! Here's the Speccy from last night when I did a quick hardware check:
Running immediately after more than 20 years in storage! Pretty impressive.
Today I tried loading Elite. Unfortunately the tape deck did not survive the storage - belts perished and electronics shot. I'd already messed about with the wiring in the past so I patched in an old CD player (with tape deck) and gave it a go.
Best result I had was this:
Still, to my highly trained ear (I have spent literally years of time tweaking tape deck settings to load games) the tape is good enough to load but the tape deck is not good enough. I'm going to break out my high-end tape multitrack recorder which has complex equaliser controls to try again. Unfortunately it's motor is shot so I need a replacement first which could take a while.
My ultimate goal is to upload a video of Elite loading from a tape to a Spectrum, including loading screen. Spectacularly boring for most people, but I will love it!
I obviously had a later version of Elite. I was aware of it for ages before I got it - friends had it on the BBC first I think. This gold edition didn't have the Lensloc but I did have that for another game. I'm guessing I got it at age 12/13 when it was 4/5 years old (I'm a 76 baby).
Anyway I also dug out my old Speccy 128k. I thought what better than to try to load the 80s Elite on 80s hardware as a tribute! Here's the Speccy from last night when I did a quick hardware check:
Running immediately after more than 20 years in storage! Pretty impressive.
Today I tried loading Elite. Unfortunately the tape deck did not survive the storage - belts perished and electronics shot. I'd already messed about with the wiring in the past so I patched in an old CD player (with tape deck) and gave it a go.
Best result I had was this:
Still, to my highly trained ear (I have spent literally years of time tweaking tape deck settings to load games) the tape is good enough to load but the tape deck is not good enough. I'm going to break out my high-end tape multitrack recorder which has complex equaliser controls to try again. Unfortunately it's motor is shot so I need a replacement first which could take a while.
My ultimate goal is to upload a video of Elite loading from a tape to a Spectrum, including loading screen. Spectacularly boring for most people, but I will love it!
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