

The Making of Elite - jacquesm
http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-elite/

======
jacquesm
I spent weeks if not months first playing it and then taking it apart bit-by-
bit to see what made it tick. It was like putting your hand in a bag and
coming up with one gemstone after another, crazy optimizations incredibly
inventive coding and a whole load of easter eggs.

The program did a series of rounds to decrypt itself after loading, with every
new round encoded inside the previous one. After manually unwinding the first
10 or so of these onion like layers there was a message for the foolhardy:

"Does your mother know you're doing this?"

Or something to that effect. My buddy Gideon and myself knew right at that
moment just how far we were outclassed.

That didn't stop us though and taking elite apart taught me lots about
programming. Especially about programming the impossible in a severely
constrained environment.

If you want to really learn how to become a better programmer constrain your
resources and then make it work anyway.

~~~
Nanzikambe
That's hilarious, I was a huge fan of the game, but didn't ever try this. I
presume the encryption was copy protection?

~~~
jacquesm
It was to stop your from changing your 'status' to Elite without playing the
game. They had a kind of contest going.

------
iuguy
As a kid I used to take copyright protection apart on cassette based games,
mostly on Z80 based computers so I could add infinite live pokes and stick a
trainer on the front. I remember Elite on the ZX Spectrum (I played it mostly
on the MSX, although I never got round to cracking it). The copy I had used a
funky loader used in games released by Firebird.

The Firebird bleepload was interesting in that it had a small leader tone and
loaded small blocks of data, checked them with (IIRC but I could be wrong) a
CRC, incremented a block count and then loaded the next block. Because this
was all done at the standard spectrum loading speed it actually made games
take longer to load than normal, but had the supposed advantage of being able
to rewind and retry a block if it didn't load successfully, or as was the case
for many people, continuously fail to load a block successfully.

There were a fair few releases of Elite, I remember there being a version that
used a terrible copyright protection mechanism called Lenslok (I first saw it
in a game called TT Racer). Lenslok was a plastic prism that had to be
calibrated to your TV each time you loaded a game. It would display two
characters mangled in a way that supposedly could only be read through the
prism (but you could just document the characters that came up when you had
the lenslok viewer and then look them up when you didn't have one.

Using a Multiface (which was a hardware device that would jump to a special
area of onboard memory with a hex editor when a special red button was
pressed) and a debugger you could pull the loader apart, find the jump to the
decompression/game start routine then usually step through to the code, patch
the jump to lenslok out (although I preferred changing the code that checks
user input to always compare to itself in case any later checks would match,
some people would just jump to the successful code entry address too) and then
modify the loader to patch the code or jump to the address on start.

The multiface also had the ability to dump out the contents of memory to disk
as a snapshot, but it would check to see if the multiface was there afterwards
as it's own form of copyright protection. This again was pretty
straightforward to patch out, but felt like cheating, and if you hadn't
already cracked the loader then if you wanted to dump out the loading screen
you'd risk losing the bottom 512 bytes IIRC due to the menu that popped (but I
might be wrong, it's been nearly 30 years since I've used one).

------
knotty66
David Braben got an MBE yesterday in the Queens birthday honours list.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27836293](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27836293)

Elite: Dangerous is looking incredible too, it could be the first killer app
for the Oculus Rift.

~~~
Gracana
I'm so excited for Dangerous and Star Citizen. We haven't had any good space
sims for quite a while, and I'm ready for their return.

------
mattgodbolt
I've started taking the Beeb Elite apart, so far as far as the text printing
routine: [http://xania.org/201406/elites-crazy-string-
format](http://xania.org/201406/elites-crazy-string-format)

And of course if you want to relive the glory in your browser:
[http://bbc.godbolt.org/?disc=elite.ssd&autoboot](http://bbc.godbolt.org/?disc=elite.ssd&autoboot)

~~~
jacquesm
That was the most dangerous link anybody ever posted to HN.

Incredible how more than 30 years later all the keystrokes are still in muscle
memory. Really have to stay very far away from that website :)

~~~
dang
With a recommendation like that, how can we not implore mattgodbolt to submit
it as its own story?

Matt, please submit it if you're so inclined. :)

~~~
mattgodbolt
Haha thanks for the vote of confidence but I've already submitted it before
and had some good feedback. I've written a series of articles on emulating a
BBC too, which have also been submitted; my webserver felt the strain then too
:)

~~~
jacquesm
Super stuff Matt. I was toying with the idea of doing something very much like
that a few years ago but felt that the copyright issues were hairy enough that
I should stay away from it. I loved the emulation articles. This is totally
off-topic and I can probably find out if I go through your website but did you
get mode 7 to work as well?

------
jimmcslim
Elite was probably the most memorable game from my youth. I do hope that
Elite: Dangerous is a suitable modern realisation of the world the original
portrayed in my imagination. The Frontier titles seemed to fall quite short in
my view.

I always thought Eve might be the massively multiplayer Elite I always want to
play, but ended up being too impenetrable given limited time to play it...
hopefully Elite: Dangerous' online incarnation doesn't fall into the same
trap.

The world that the manual and novella painted were incredibly vivid... I
always imagined that I might actually encounter a generation ship at some
point (in fact, maybe that does happen, I don't think I got passed the mission
to track down the stolen prototype ship).

~~~
the_af
I never played Elite back in the day, though of course I'm familiar with it
now, but I did play Frontier and I liked it.

One thing about Frontier that blew my mind and that Elite didn't have (AFAIK)
was seamless transitions between planetary surfaces and outer space. Maybe now
it's not as technically amazing as it was then -- even though right now I
can't think of a modern game that does it -- but the absence of loading
screens during the transition between planet and space is what made Frontier
so immersive for me.

~~~
joosters
Have you seen the trailer for No Man's Sky?

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M)

~~~
the_af
That was awesome, thanks! No, I hadn't seen it. And yes, the seamless
transitions I was talking about are there!

~~~
e12e
And there is of course Elite: Dangerous:

[http://elite.frontier.co.uk/](http://elite.frontier.co.uk/)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-
danger...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous)

And while I'm dropping links, I found this older interview with Bell (hosted
on Bell's homepage, apparently):

[http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5081501.htm](http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5081501.htm)

------
ibisum
I recently witnessed a 'new Elite' being built for a 30 year old computer, and
I was very pleasantly surprised to play the game when it was done:

[http://1337.defence-force.org/](http://1337.defence-force.org/)

The Oric-1/Atmos machines
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric)) never
got the respect they deserved at the time in the 80's .. but they sure get
some great stuff made for them these days! In case there's anyone out there on
HN that has an Oric-1/Atmos, and feels the need to vindicate their purchase
with a classic, stellar, high quality game that was always only ever available
on 'those other machines' .. well then, wire up your machine, and check l337
out immediately - because the Oric can finally play Elite too! (And don't
forget about all the other new, 'old' stuff, being made available for the Oric
scene at [http://oric.org/](http://oric.org/) .. Space 1999, anyone! :)

~~~
jacquesm
I remember the Oric. The first machine they put out had calculator like keys
that put it right in there with the Sinclair stuff, good for a few weeks and
then you'd be longing for something a bit more solid.

At the same time Oric came out with the Atmos there was competition from
Tandy/Radio shack (with the 6809 based Color Computer), the BBC Micro, the
earlier Acorn Atom (you can see where the Atmos got its name), the Dragon 32
(a color computer knock-off from the UK) and a whole bunch of low end machines
much like the Oric Atmos and of course the wildly popular Commodore 64 and ZX
Spectrum.

It's no wonder they didn't make it, as a Spectrum-clone but 6502 based and
only a little bit cheaper than the Spectrum it was clearly a 'me-too' product,
and with the build quality of the '1' I think they damaged their brand.

~~~
ibisum
I dunno, I have had both since the beginning, and I feel on the basis of
experience during that era that the Oric-1 just felt tons, tons better. (Still
have my Oric-1, long since got rid of the Speccie kit..)

Maybe it doesn't really look like it in pictures, but its quite more usable as
a keyboard than most other bits of gear. Much, much better than the ZX
Spectrum, anyway .. but I learned to touch type on my Oric, so maybe I'm
biased. Also, it can be argued that the Oric was a better machine than the
Spectrum - although the Spectrum had far better market traction.

This was a lesson I learned during that era but applied every decade since:
its not about the power, its about the users. It doesn't matter if the machine
is 'better' on spec; if the market allows for lesser technology, so be it for
us developers to follow along.

But .. what is it about the 6502 that made it 'worse' than the Z80? A lot of
the other machines in your list used similar CPU's .. even the C64 had a
6502-derived processor (6510) ..

~~~
jacquesm
There is absolutely nothing that made the 6502 worse than the Z80, I far
preferred programming 6502 asm above Z80 asm.

Don't confuse the machine with the CPU.

Being late to the party and not offering anything that made it stand out at a
similar price point was enough to make it a non-starter. I don't fault them
for trying though, the '8 bit home computer' was an area that everybody was
trying to get into back then.

~~~
pkroll
Eh, the Z80 had a memory move command that was fast and convenient, and
successors (Z80K!) that went to 32 bit. Now, the 6809, that was a sweet 8-bit.
:)

~~~
jacquesm
And OS/9 a sweet bit of code...

------
Luyt
They're working on a modern version nowadays. I think it's in beta.
[http://elite.frontier.co.uk/](http://elite.frontier.co.uk/)

~~~
mongrol
and while we're waiting there's www.oolite.org and www.pioneerspacesim.net

------
ekianjo
Very timely article, I've just published a long post about Oolite, an open
source remake of Elite (that goes way beyond the original):

[http://pandoralive.info/?p=3481](http://pandoralive.info/?p=3481).

~~~
BgSpnnrs
Seems to be down, friend.

------
walshemj
Doesn't mention that Elite was heavily influenced by a pen and paper RPG
Traveller. I did start messing around trying to write a Traveller ship combat
game at my first job.

------
rwmj
Good book on this (and similar) subjects:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-
British/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-
British/dp/0571214975)

------
Sniffnoy
Jimmy Maher goes into more detail on the making of Elite here:
[http://www.filfre.net/2013/12/elite/](http://www.filfre.net/2013/12/elite/)

------
mattlondon
Elite (well, Frontier) changed my life, and for the better. I've met Vint Cerf
a few times now, but I think I'd be more star-struck meeting Braben.

~~~
jacquesm
It helps to think of Braben & Bell as the 1980s version of John Carmack &
Markus Persson.

------
warrenmar
Elite Postmortem at GDC

[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-
Postmortem](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem)

------
peterashford
This was the game that made me buy an Amiga :o) I'd played other versions
previously, but the Ami version was the best.

