RISC Conversions

Commander AW

C
What is the possibility of Frontier Developments doing a conversion of Darxide for RISC OS machines?


Also, and probably more importantly apart from using DOSbox it' s impossible to play Frontier or FFE on RISC OS machines. Even with DOSbox its too slow.

This has always seemed to me to be a major injustice in gaming terms. RISC OS is the successor of the computer that created the original Elite and thousands of people held out for Elite 2 which proved impossible on the BBC Miicro. There was some consolation with ArcElite. To me this indicated that David Braben and Ian Bell were generous and fond enough of the original platform to want its users to continue to enjoy the Elite experience for the long term. ArcElite was an amazing experience at the time but it didn't allow the ongoing story to be enjoyed by RISC OS users. This is sad.

Both David Braben and Peter Irvin started out with an almighty bang on Acorn computers and David continued with the RISC machines with Zarch and even wondered abot Virus at one point. I wonder if Peter would like to make another contribution to this unique and loyally followed platform?
 

starman

starman
There is a whole generation who never experienced te joys of a 'Home computer'. Some tried with the Spectrum next. PC can seem over kill for some casual coding.
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
Commander AW said:
What is the possibility of Frontier Developments doing a conversion of Darxide for RISC OS machines?
Click to expand...
You mean port it to an obscure operating system clinging to the late 1980s? Zero would be my guess. "Why?" would be my question.

As for FE2 and FFE, I don't think anybody really knows who even holds the license(s) or publishing rights for those suckers.
 

AndyJ

AndyJ
Shadowdancer said:
As for FE2 and FFE, I don't think anybody really knows who even holds the license(s) or publishing rights for those suckers.
Click to expand...

I think that the publishing rights reverted back to Frontier after they successfully sued Gametek for unpaid royalties on Frontier Elite 2 and Frontier First Emcounters. (settled after Take Two bought out the failing Gametek)
FD released the DOS versions of the games as shareware in 2001 with updated title sequences to reflect this.

Commander AW said:
Also, and probably more importantly apart from using DOSbox it' s impossible to play Frontier or FFE on RISC OS machines. Even with DOSbox its too slow.
Click to expand...

A better bet for playing "Frontier" might be running the Amiga or Atari-ST versions via an emulator. (I'm assuming Raspberry Pi?)

Frontier did around 2000/2001 plan to release the C source to FFE under NDA to allow the fanbase to update and potentially release new versions via their long defunct "The Elite Club" site, but this never came to pass. The unofficially updated versions are all based off JJFFE and as that's mostly raw 32bit x86 assembly code and data - it's never likely to be ported to anything else and I'm sure any attempt would be shutdown rapidly if anyone tried to. (but no-one's got that much spare time lol)
 
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