[HN Gopher] Elite for Emacs (2015)
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Elite for Emacs (2015)
Author : nanna
Score : 257 points
Date : 2023-01-27 19:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.salkosuo.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.salkosuo.net)
| bhhaskin wrote:
| If you liked Elite, you should check out Elite Dangerous.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| If you liked Elite, you should check out Oolite [1] too. FOSS,
| lots of mods.
|
| [1] http://www.oolite.org/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I wish a better company was in charge of Elite Dangerous. They
| burned a lot of good will when they dropped console support. I
| miss flying space ships but I don't miss the unending grind and
| mostly empty galaxy. Wish it had a Mass Effect-like richness to
| it but it's essentially a menu simulator attached to an awesome
| space flight simulator.
| buster wrote:
| Yes, I loved dangerous but I don't play on the PC anymore,
| so... I'd pay for a Nintendo switch version anytime.
| jicea wrote:
| My favorite NES game has always been Elite [1]. It's really a
| marvelous gem, that, in my opinion, is not well known. Happy
| memories...
|
| [1]: https://www.justgamesretro.com/nes/elite
| bitwize wrote:
| The NES version famously recreated the vector graphics of the
| home computer originals by having RAM in part of its character
| ROM area on the cartridge, that could be used effectively as a
| framebuffer upon which the vector graphics could be drawn.
|
| We never got this remarkable NES game in NA. More's the pity.
| Bondi_Blue wrote:
| This is wild. Elite is an amazing game. The NES port is
| particularly impressive given the limitations, not just with
| respect to pushing polygons, but to how carefully they chose to
| adapt the controls. And it is the only game, save for a few
| obscure modern homebrew roms, that manages to render polygons on
| the NES (though many games used sprite scaling and other
| techniques to pull off a 3D appearance with varying degrees of
| success).
|
| I wish the NTSC version (which was never shipped on cartridges)
| could run without graphical issues on a real NTSC NES. Instead
| you need a PAL NES or a PAL Emulator.
|
| See the story about how Elite came about if you're curious:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWoF5uVgbA
| 6510 wrote:
| video?
| Otek wrote:
| This needs [2015]
| dang wrote:
| Ah thanks! Added.
| Torwald wrote:
| The police ship in Elite is the Viper almost like in vi vs Emacs,
| kinda funny.
|
| An open source version of the Elite universe:
|
| http://www.oolite.org/
| [deleted]
| gwern wrote:
| (I'm always pleased when I click on a submission and it's exactly
| what I inferred it could not be.)
| guessbest wrote:
| Probably because the online culture in 2003 was a lot tighter
| coupled and now it seems more spread out in different
| simultaneous directions. It even includes the obligatory Docker
| container.
| detrites wrote:
| I too was so ready to be disappointed...
| throwanem wrote:
| In fairness, it looks more like the old Palm game Space Trader,
| ie roughly the same trade model but combat handled by dice
| rolls - if there's any code in here for Elite-style 3D combat,
| I've yet to see it. (Even without graphics and rendering to a
| text buffer, it would be a hell of a thing to get working in
| circa-2001 Emacs on a circa-2001 machine!)
|
| That said, I do still _play_ Space Trader, every now and
| again...
| anthk wrote:
| Well, if Emacs supported XEmbed, you could just render a dumb
| easy X11 port of Elite with wireframe graphics.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm okay with it not. I first got in the habit of building
| Emacs some time around 2011 precisely because distro builds
| all wanted to use GTK+ widgets and that caused a lot of
| crashes, and it turned out there's not honestly anything
| Emacs _needs_ X widgets for, anyway.
|
| That said, Emacs can embed a Webkit widget if you build it
| to, and I bet there's a web version of Elite out there -
| I'm sure the Internet Archive has it in emulation, if
| nothing else. I think that should count for about as much.
| anthk wrote:
| Emacs with Lucid or Athena and with proper UTF8 support
| with Unifont would work okay in the 99% of the cases.
|
| Also, an Elite port with XLib or XCB would be totally
| doable. I've already played a Jet Set Willy port for X.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| At first I assumed it was going to be based on this:
| https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Space_Empire_Elite which is
| more like the trader type games you're talking about.
|
| There was a history of BBS "door" games with this style of
| interface, that would have been quite adaptable to Emacs.
|
| But yeah, his link to 'Elite' does take to the classic 3d
| game.
|
| Nifty.
| outworlder wrote:
| I have tried to reimplement the Elite trading part in
| Javascript(back when I was learning the language, I need a
| 'practical project') but I've found the galaxy generation code to
| be inscrutable. One can implement line by line, but I haven't
| found an explanation for all the byte manipulation and magic
| numbers that are used.
|
| EDIT: found this in the comments
|
| " Function and description taken from elite new kind sources. "
|
| Huh. Maybe I should look into that (and "oolite" as well).
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (relatively):
|
| _Elite for Emacs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11867751 - June 2016 (46
| comments)
| eointierney wrote:
| Elite on the BBC Micro as a child, awesome. Still the best game I
| ever tried to play. Used to play it two-handed with a cousin of
| the same age, we'd load up his elder brother's saved game from
| cassette just to play with all the weapons. Now on emacs!
|
| I remember his da, an engineer, talk abour ADA as a new-fangled
| thing, with Basic being deprecated as childish, in a good way
| foruhar wrote:
| I played way too much Elite on the BBC micro (vs studying). As
| a kid learinging to program I thought Braben and Bell were
| gods. It blew my mind that my 6502 computer could manifest the
| experience that was Elite.
|
| Braben went on to write Zarch/Virus that blew my teenage mind
| on the Acorn Archimedes A3000 which was the first ARM CPU that
| most people could actually get their hands on. Decades later
| Braben was one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi
| foundation with cheap as chips (when in stock) computers built
| around an ARM CPU.
| DrBazza wrote:
| There was or is, a mode 7 version of Elite too.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2emwRygvEAA
| aardvark179 wrote:
| On the other end of the ridiculous spectrum there is a port of
| Elite II to the BBC Micro with an ARM second processor. With an
| upgraded video ULA it looks pretty good.
| helf wrote:
| What's great, too, about the been tube version is that both
| CPUs are actually used. At least with the dual 6502 version.
| I'm assuming the ARM may be a bit different.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I have been trying to get into Elite as part of my retro-gaming
| hobby, but so far my particular combination of free time +
| learning-motivation-levels are like "best I can do is Space
| Trader for Palm".
|
| I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid,
| preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander,
| etc.
|
| Still, I love seeing the proliferation of things like this into
| Emacs. The psychology of Elite-type games has a strong
| propagation bonus factor within general tech psychology. It's
| like if you view tech as a mandelbrot set, you zoom in and you
| can start to see these little Elite wings all over.
|
| (From recent discussions it seems like Lite-XL ought to enable
| this kind of effort too? Being SDL based and anything-goes on the
| scripting side, I'd just hazard a guess)
| the_af wrote:
| > _I 'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was
| a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike
| Commander, etc._
|
| Why annoyed? Those are all excellent games to have spent time
| with. I still have very fond memories of Strike Commander, and
| even learned a thing or two about real jet fighters and their
| weapons with it.
|
| For modern computers: remember there's always the Oolite
| project :)
| helf wrote:
| Space trader for palmos is the bomb! I spent way way too many
| hours playing that.
|
| .. I may have that on my current android phone using a palmos
| emulator. There's also an actual android port of it too though.
|
| Did you ever get to play the leaked Elite 3D port for palmos?
| The dev couldn't get rights for release so abandoned it. I
| cracked and released it after that. I was a beta tester. It's a
| hoot. Works well. Even has a plug-in for the vibrator on the
| Palm M5xx series.
| throwanem wrote:
| You don't even need a native emulator! CloudpilotEmu works
| great, and runs in any modern browser. You'll need to supply
| your own ROM, but those aren't hard to come by these days.
|
| I did not get to play the 3d version. I'd love to try it out
| on my old TX, if you happen to know where a .prc might be
| found... ;)
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's a good point about Android, I think I play the FDroid
| one or something like that.
|
| I never saw the Elite 3D you mentioned, sounds great. How was
| the color palette? Just curious if it was more monochrome or
| colorful.
|
| I was probably hitting the Cybiko Xtreme really hard at that
| time, having all but given up on gaming on my HP Jornada and
| finding some relief in the KayBee Toys clearance bin ;-)
|
| I do have a bunch of space trading games ready to go here for
| when the right time comes, and I like to leave the Elite Plus
| attract screen open in a DOSBox window sometimes...
| helf wrote:
| Always wanted a cybiko. Had a jornada 720! Great devices
| for the time.
|
| The game is very colorful. I loved it. Here's the original
| website for it.
|
| http://www.harbaum.org/till/palm/elite/index.html
|
| And apparently he either released or something else a v1.0
| with the source code and it is up here:
|
| https://palmdb.net/app/elite-palm
|
| I didn't know this copy existed till a few minutes ago.
| I've only played the one I had which was a version 0.9.5 or
| 9.7 iirc. So now I'm curious to test this out.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Oh that's pretty. Looks fun, thanks for sharing the links
| too. Amazing how far they took it on the platform,
| including Sony Clie multi-track audio!
| helf wrote:
| Can you imagine it on like the Tapwave Zodiac? I wish i
| kept mine. Palmos game system. Analog joystick and all.
| Was so awesome.
| [deleted]
| nix23 wrote:
| Take privateer first the "gemini gold edition" ;)
|
| https://privateer.sourceforge.net/
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Tried it but can't get it to start due to an issue with
| parsing the config, it looks like.
|
| ~/.alsoftrc:
|
| > (define devices '(arts esd native))
|
| Not sure what to do but it's segfaulting when trying to work
| with that.
| nix23 wrote:
| Linux? If yes try the windows version with wine. (the
| better linux runtime for games)
| anthk wrote:
| Or simply delete the "artsd" string and Pulseaudio with
| ESD support will do its magic.
| nix23 wrote:
| Yes and don't have a filesystem with inode64...but hey
| it's much easier to just use wine for every game, native
| linux games are a joke (with the usual exceptions).
| anthk wrote:
| Define "joke". Bakc in the day a lot of people played
| emulated games from SNES/MD/MAME and webs like Newgrounds
| and alikes in Spanish (Minijuegos) than former AAA games.
| Later, lots of people were into Ogame.
|
| On these libre games, such as Slashem, OOLite,OpenTTD,
| VegaStrike, Battle for Wesnoth and such a lot of people
| played more hours than they would acknowledge.
|
| BTW, VegaStrike it's native and available on the distros.
| anthk wrote:
| Emacs has a Infocom interpreter too, Malyon.
|
| M-x package install malyon; load a Z? file: M-x malyon.
| teddyh wrote:
| See also: M-x dunnet
| anthk wrote:
| Nice, but for free as in freedom games, (and more complex
| ones) git check-out some from https://jxself.org/git/. I
| suggest Spiritwrak for a Zorkian adventure, and All Thing
| Devours for a crazy time traveling puzzle.
|
| You can compile the required inform6 compiler (cc -o inform
| src/*.c; mv inform /usr/local/bin) and inform-lib with ease
| from that. When building some game with build.sh, if it
| fails, run "git submodule update --init --recursive" and run
| sh "build.sh" again.
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