Thank you, that's a good point. The site started off with just the BBC Micro version, and I never expanded the book references to be clearer.
Anyway, I have reworded every reference to books in the commentary so they now contain the full title and author list, so hopefully people will be able to find the relevant tomes. I've also linked to the books from my "useful links" page in a more prominent manner:
Glad you like it! I’ve been working on this for nearly five years, along with my other software archaeology projects - I started in May 2020, back in lockdown. It’s a true labour of love.
Thank you! I came at it from the BBC Micro angle, which was the system I grew up with, and I have to say that analysing Elite been a brilliant way to learn about other 8-bit platforms. I’ve documented the NES version and now the Commodore 64, and the Apple II is next.
It’s the retro equivalent of discovering that if you like the Beatles, you’ll probably like the Stones, The Who and Pink Floyd. :-)
This is not a big list, and these are all pretty subtle aspects of the game. After 4 years of analysis, I think we’re pretty close to understanding pretty much everything, which is nice.
Well, exactly. This project is a hobby, and I’d like to try to keep it as my happy place!
Besides, I’ve published PDFs of my travel writing sites, and the thought of trying to keep a code repository, a website and a PDF in sync fills me with dread…
Honestly, for me personally and on this specific project with its specific history of copyright issues (look it up!), that would be crossing the line into disrespecting the copyright situation.
Websites are ethereal, in a sense, as they are easy to switch off and hard to copy and distribute. PDFs and books are the opposite. Sure, websites get archived and repos get forked, but I think PDFs and books fall into a different area.
I run these projects very cautiously and very carefully. I don't think publishing a book or PDF containing copyright material is a good idea in this instance, to be honest!
Yeah, it's a bit tricky when the code you are documenting is copyright, and you aren't the copyright owner. Website is one thing, but publishing a book? I suspect that is asking for trouble.
Also, books can't be updated, and I update this stuff all the time...
Some parts of Elite were documented prior to my project, particularly the procedural generation and ship data blocks. But none of it was documented to this level; it's taken time, lots of it!
I love this game, and I figured it deserved a proper homage. Or, to put it another way, this is a labour of love. :-)
The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work.
Yes. The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work.
All NOPs should be explained in the commentary, apart from the ones in the fast loader routine in the elite-gma1.asm file. Are these the ones you mean?
If so, I haven't documented the fast loader as it's not really a feature of Elite, but I think the NOPs there are for timing when talking to the CIA1. The fast loader is documented in the Elite Harmless project, here, which might help:
The long string of NOPs in the elite-firebird.asm source are padding to ensure the vector overrides align with the correct addresses, as described in the commentary.
Most other NOPs are commenting out the checksums if that feature is disabled by the build; again, they should be explained in situ.
If you're wondering about any others, I'd be happy to explain!
No, the Cougar is nothing to do with missions (in the 6502 versions, anyway - the other platforms have different mission code). It's just a rarely called part of the random spawning routine. Very rarely called.
The mission-related ship is the Constrictor, which you only bump into at the end of that mission.
It is in-game, but it is astonishingly rare. Specifically, there is a 0.011% chance of spawning a Cougar during each ship spawning routine, which is around 1 in 9000 ship spawnings
And it's got a cloaking device so it doesn't appear on your scanner.
Anyone who has genuinely seen one of these in-game is a really lucky commander!
That's not fear, it's an indication of the respect in which I hold the original authors (whom I believe are still the copyright holders). If Bell or Braben asked me to take it this down, I'd roll with it. Same if Geoff Crammond asked me to take down my Aviator and Revs analyses; of course I'd comply. It's their code.
I have copyright content out there in the world (including the commentary aspects of this project), and I'd want to be able to control what happens to that too. Seems fair to me.
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Check 3 only looks to see if we are moving backwards into the station slot. This is a bit pointless to calculate as falling backwards would mean that a number of the other checks (e.g. angle of approach) will already be failing.
This is why check 3 is omitted from later versions of Elite, including the C64 version; it isn't needed.
Besides, is this a bug or a feature? Elite lore says that machine intelligence is banned in the galaxy, so I like to think of this as fitting in with that. Docking computers can kill you in Elite - and it's the same in Elite Dangerous. :-)
I love the BASIC assembler on the BBC Micro and Archimedes. It is a work of art.
Incidentally, the fully buildable Lander source code in the website's accompanying git repository is also in BBC BASIC format - as an attempt to imagine what the original source might have looked like.
I've always felt that calling Lander a "demo" was harsh. It's a fully featured game in itself, and has features that Zarch doesn't (such as falling rocks and hover mode). Yes, Zarch was the result of continued development of Lander, but Lander stands on its own, and to me, that makes it a game in its own right, not a demo.
It's also a lot more relaxing to play. There's nothing more chill than flying over the bucolic landscape of Lander - no aliens or viruses in this version!
Anyway, I have reworded every reference to books in the commentary so they now contain the full title and author list, so hopefully people will be able to find the relevant tomes. I've also linked to the books from my "useful links" page in a more prominent manner:
https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/useful_links.html
I hope that helps!