Retro PC game Elite Plus - manual anyone: sorted

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Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 4:09 am

I thought I'd have a retro night in - crank up the 800MHz 98SE (not the oldest I have still working), put on Elite Plus
the space game {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)} that plays the Blue Danube in the background, and let a few hours go by.

Couldn't find it.

So I cranked up Dangerous Dave 2 - but it repeats the first stage ad nauseum.

So then I hunted amongst the thousand odd CDs and floppies (large and small) and finally found Elite, installed it.. and blow me down I'd forgotten the damned access technique they have: they ask for a certain word by reference to the manual. Dammit!

I've searched online and found the manual in full, but as the game wants 'page x; line y; word z' and as the online manual isn't formatted the same way as the book, I'm stuck.

Can anyone help out with a couple of pages from the manual - wait, does anyone have the manual? (The Elite Flight Training manual)

I suppose I'll have to play tetris

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 9:58 am

@Firehouse5 - a million thanks for your PM.

(I received a long list of words which I'll try soon)

Nice to know someone else has the game. It goes nowhere, slowly but is quite addictive.

Baiting Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 12237

GordonBennett wrote:

It goes nowhere, slowly

I haven't heard that in years, thanks for the laugh. Laughing

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 26 Sep 2008 Posts: 689

I used to love playing Frontier Elite II ... yes I remember those password routines .... wasn't there a hack for it though? It's been a long time! There were so many built in cheats! LOL

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 2:59 pm

I had copied that manual down word for word - unless you are already furnished, you can try to decipher my handwriting Smile

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 3:42 pm

This thread really brings up memories - at one point I had stacks and stacks of hand-copied manuals, home made copy-protection wheels, and so on. Especially annoying were those schemes that couldn't be easily translated into text...

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 4:04 pm

I remember having a game called The Incredible Machine, which had this diagram in the manual with numbers corresponding to certain symbols, upon startup the game would give you three numbers and you'd have to click the right symbols... Really annoying protection.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Ah Yes. Elite. The original on the BBC Micro.

The tape version had no mining lasers - there wasn't room.
The disk version had no asteroids - some idiot had switched them off when they built the distribution.
Years later, I finally got a version with both, and it was a crap way to make money.

On the tape version, autopilot just jumped you into the spacestation, but on the disk version it tried to pilot you in - very badly, very dangerously. I had a an accelerator pedal that I made that made it at least reasonably safe; you waited until the autopilot had lined up and then floored the throttle before it decided to re-align.

The prize for the worst copy-protection must go to WordWise. They made a wordprocessor that refused to run in my second processor, because it thought it was in sideways RAM. So I lost several K of available space and had to keep switching the processor off. All sideways RAM cards came with a switch that defeated that check anyway.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 48

Check out Oolite.

It's an open source version and seems to be identical to the original (from what I can tell).

It also has some nice graphical enhancements.

I managed to get to Deadly (rank before Elite) when I played on my Beeb back in the 80s. Now I can't play it for toffee!!

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Quote:

It requires at least a 400 MHz processor, 256 MiB of memory, and a graphics card capable of accelerating OpenGL graphics.

So just like the original, but it needs 200 times the processor speed, at least four times the word size and eight thousand times the memory of the original. Not to mention the installer being well over two hundred and fifty times as large. It looks pretty, so I'll forgive them asking for a graphics processor.

Just for the record, I'm not being fair to them; the original was a staggering piece of engineering.

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 10:13 pm

The original is under 300kb, which is amazing, all things considered.
On my first computer (386 with 2mb ram and 20mb hard drive) I had a flight sim game that allowed you to dog fight, in colour, over the Pacific, and then review your fight from any angle you wanted (and you could shift the point dynamically as you watched).

And what about Retaliator which fits on my 1.44mb floppy with Dangerous Dave 2 and Elite?

Good fun, the old ones.

Frumpy wrote:

I had copied that manual down word for word

The days before photocopiers and scanners, eh!

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