{"id":2212,"date":"2009-09-23T21:04:56","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T01:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2212"},"modified":"2009-09-24T20:19:25","modified_gmt":"2009-09-25T00:19:25","slug":"elite-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2212","title":{"rendered":"Elite 25"},"content":{"rendered":"

V<\/span>ia-via, I heard about the 25th anniversary of the computer game ‘Elite’ (Wikipedia<\/a>), indeed as Wikipedia calls it, the seminal Space\/Trading\/Combat game released in September of 1984. It was first released for an Acorn BBC and over the years it was (succesfully) ported to other 8 bit systems, like, in our case, the MSX computers.\n<\/p>\n

If I remember correctly, we found out about the game in a popular tech magazine, which detailed the addictiveness and open-endedness of the game. The graphics for the game were pretty much advanced too, that is, for the early Eighties: I mean, who would have thought of using vector graphics to draw 3D spaceships and celestial bodies?\n<\/p>\n

Eventually, a lot later than everybody else, we got our hands on a copy of the game and found out that ‘docking’ at space stations was a nearly impossible task. We weren’t the only ones who thought it was impossibler: Twenty five years later, David Braben (co-designer of the game) admitted:\n<\/p>\n

Pt2. I might want to make docking a bit easier \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but we did try at the time \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we had no more memory to make it any more sophisticated.\n<\/p>\n

Et tu, David?\n<\/p>\n

That didn’t stop us from playing the game though: in fact, we managed to reverse-engineer the savegame file format. Which meant that we were able to give ourselves a whole bunch of credits, specialty upgrades and the inevitable and necessary ‘docking’ device (of course). Not bad and I wonder if that part was the foundation for the “file-format studies”<\/a> I eventually embarked on in my career as a programmer.<\/p>\n

I personally never made it to the rank ‘Elite’: I can’t even remember how long I played it but it definitely wasn’t for years. Like all other games, it eventually wore out. I don’t think we ever discovered the proper bits to set this rank in our savefiles (we assumed it was heavily encoded with checksums). That is, until recently, I hear that the magic word was 0x1900.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via-via, I heard about the 25th anniversary of the computer game ‘Elite’ (Wikipedia), indeed as Wikipedia calls it, the seminal Space\/Trading\/Combat game released in September of 1984. It was first released for an Acorn BBC and over the years it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,39],"tags":[400,188],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2213,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions\/2213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}