So here are some of my Elite based gaming rigs from over the years...
BITD I played Elite on my BBC Micro which had 32K of RAM and it loaded it from cassette.
My original rig and copy of Elite can be seen on my website which also shows me getting it running on a modern RISC OS install on a Raspberry Pi under emulation of an Archimedes machine, running it on a 43" Sony TV!!!
It took around 11 minutes to load the game and took up around 20K of code space with the remaining 12K of the 32K of RAM being used for the video memory.
In more recent times. My BBC Micro got some upgrades including a second 6502 processor which allowed it to have more RAM and a faster clock speed. That machine also has the ability to load games from a USB stick so load times are significantly reduced i.e. it takes seconds to load the "Executive edition" of Elite which runs on the second processor and uses the main BBC for the I/O of the game only.
The BBC Micro is driving the CRT machine on the left of the image.
On the left are two Acorn Archimedes machines, stacked. Only one is on and it's running Elite using a bit of hardware I designed called a
VIDC Enhancer which allows the machine from 1987 to drive a modern(ish) SVGA monitor at the correct refresh rates by replacing the video clock of 24MHz with one that runs at 25.175Mhz or 36MHz depending on the display mode required.
I also played on an Amiga 500 BITD but I don't have any photo's of that.
After the Beeb and the Amiga, I played Frontier on the Amiga 1200, the Frontier II on the PC. Sadly no images of these games on my hardware either.
Then we come to the modern day era. This was my first Elite Dangerous rig an MSI Dominator. It was a really good laptop for its time and ran a GTX870M GFX card so Elite would run but, eventually, it died. A lot of the hardware got re-distributed into other laptops, including the 10 year old laptop I'm running to write this post on. It might be 10 but it's got plenty of RAM and the drives are all now SSD types and I've taken the NIC from the dead gaming laptop and put it in this machine too so it has a WiFi 5 NIC with Bluetooth internally. Bluetooth was a USB dongle on this laptop before I switched the NIC for the one from my MSI Dominator...
This was my first rig with an eye/head tracker and the tobii is
amazing, it meant that the game on a laptop had real immersion with head look being so intuitive.
The Dominator was replaced by another MSI machine, a
GL75 9SE which is now around 18 months old to me. I've just upgraded it to Windows 11 and as you can see, the HOTAS has carried over from the Dominator but my rig has expanded quite a lot. Alongside the Steelseries mouse which also game from the Dominator days, a Steelseries Apex M750 keyboard was added, a MSI 27" curved monitor, the tobii got a custom stand and the screen from the Dominator was upcycled into a stand alone portrait monitor.
I run a custom build of EDDiscovery where the changes are basically there to reduce the number of CTD's that occur when profile switching in EDDiscovery if you do it too fast. I've submitted a PR for the changes I've made so they may one day make it into an official build.
A closer lock at the keyboard shows how I've spent time colour coding the keys for different functions in game. The keyboard automatically switches to this profile when playing Elite and the keypad is chock full of macro's to handle faster PIP management.
Currently I'm also testing out Voiceattack with the Verity pack but I'm struggling to get it to work correctly as I live in a noisy environment so it triggers and hears things that haven't happened a lot of the time. It needs tweaking quite a bit but the Yeti mic. is very sensitive and can pick up audio from another room sometimes!!!
Anyway, these are my rigs, I hope you like the trip down memory lane about where Elite came from...
UPDATE:
I've managed to sort out Voiceattack by exclusively using my headphones when playing to cut out any issues with the mic. picking up audio from the game and then interpreting that audio as an instruction. I've also lowered the command weight from its default to a value of 35, with the confidence level now set to 65 rather than 90 which is what I originally set it to.
Making these changes has solved all of the issues I was having so thanks to everyone in the the HCS VoicePacks Discord support channels who were able to assist me in getting up and running with it. Their help, knowledge and speed of response was invaluable.
The missing keybind report that the HCS package can create is super useful too, I've been able to add keybinds for certain ship functions that mean I don't need to have those functions set up in firegroups. Now they're not in firegroups, it makes the configuration of my firegroups much more efficient and combat situations much easier to work in.
Other changes I've made including adding more macro's when compared to the video I linked to in this post for slightly different combinations of PIP's, all of them are configured so there are no situations where there are no zero PIP configurations. The entire numeric keypad (keys 1-9) have PIP configurations that give me a fast and intuitive way to set specific PIP levels as quickly as possible. This has proved really useful when fighting Thargoids which can be quite an intense fast paced part of the game.
UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention, in the room that I'm in, we've got some RGB smart bulbs that are hooked up to Alexa. I've got a routine that sets the light above my computer to the HUD RGB and dims or turns off the other lighting in the room. It really adds to the immersion of the game.
In terms of the lighting, the rear of the monitor has a few LED's that can be used to "mirror" the colours on screen so it backlights the wall and adds to the overall immersion in a subtle way. They're nowhere near as bright as some of the other rigs I've seen but they do work.
