Hi group,
Heh, just realised I kinda started posting without properly saying hi
and introducing myself a bit. Can't remember if I am technically a
newbie or not, might have been posted here before in the early 90s
when FE2 was fresh out on the Amiga, but might have been in
comp.sys.amiga.games.... or somewhere like that. Hard to tell even
with google groups, 'coz I don't even remember what e-mail addy or
nick I had at the time, probably a compuserve one or something cryptic
from a .ac.uk
Being in the UK at the time of the orignal release of Elite, I had a
48K spectrum (didn't everyone?) and somehow missed the original phase
of popularity of the game. I was playing some kind of clone on the
Speccy, forgot the name of it, (darkstar??) and enjoying that. Then in
'86 or '87 I was allowed lunchtime privileges on the schools
technology room computer, which was a BBC Master with disk drives and
all sorts of addon goodies, it was mainly there for an interfacing/
robotics system and materials estimating program. From somewhere a
disk full of games appeared... Elite was one of them... and I got
hooked... so clean and crisp it was in wireframe on that old Cub RGB
monitor... very slick and smooth it was too, not sure that that Master
didn't have an upgraded CPU (unusual I know) running 8mhz or
something.. So then I realise that the game I had on my speccy was a
poor, poor, shadow of a third hand imitation of elite... and begin to
look for a copy of the real thing.... the stuffiest "business
machiniest" computer store in town, i.e. the one no kids ever went to,
still had a new copy on the tape rack.... w00t!!! so I paid my 7 quid
or whatever it was and eagerly loaded it up, bleeeeeb-blip...bleeeeeeb-
blibilililip...... and was dissappointed :-( ... I knew the sound
would be typically 'orrible, but kinda thought the graphics would be
on a par with the Beeb, ah well, I played it anyway...
By the time the 90s rolled around, the spectrum was of course very
aged, a new computer had to be had, I drooled over sinclair QLs, STs
and even sam coupe's at the local 'pooter stores, then saw an Amiga
500 at the Tandy/RadioShack and knew I had to have one. Alas it was to
be a couple of years still until I had the cash to buy one, meanwhile
however, I got my hands on a couple of beat up and well used Amstrad
XT clones for cheap, which I basically rebuilt, and had a brief fling
with a PC version of Elite, before the dodgy CGA monitor went out
completely, then I was stuck with text mode MDA, and booting blind
until I could type set mode=mono. Eventually I could put cash aside to
buy an Amiga, and was the proud owner of an all-new A1200 (complete
with modulator issues, grrrr) with a whopping 80MB HDD... Now FE2 was
previewing about the same time I think, I seem to remember a false
start on the release date, and not being able to get it for quite a
while, anyhoo, in the meantime, to have something to play, I got the
space legends pack, which had the Amiga version of Elite, which was
better than the BBC version even, so played that quite a bit. Had a
coverdisk demo of FE2, which I had a tool around with but was a bit
shallow. Finally got my hands on FE2 and it was all I played on the
A1200, for days... weeks... years... ah the joys of the wormhole bug,
and the garbage dumping bug, and picking up gems and precious metals
at negative prices on the black market at Cemiess. I found even on the
A1200 it could be quite slow at times, and with using an RGB capable
TV that could sync NTSC I often booted in NTSC mode for the few frames
a second extra it gave. I aquired an Apollo A1220 trapdoor
accelerator, and 4MB of RAM to go in it, and it ran much nicer...
apart from the PSU was now overstressed and the miggy crashed a lot...
finally cobbled it up to a PC-AT PSU and was quite happy. I had the
starchart from FE2 and posters from elite pinned up in my all my
college dorm rooms.
Meanwhile with the rise of the PC I needed a more "serious" system for
doing collegework on, had a good WP on the amiga (FC II) but needed to
run stuff like Turbo Pascal and Lotus 1-2-3.... had got hold of an old
IBM XT and frankensteining parts between that and the wrecks of the
two amstrads had me a DOS system that was so slow it made the software
PC emulator on the amiga look reasonable. Further op****tunistic
purchasing and frankensteining of junky parts developed this into a
386 windows capable system, but still with mono graphics, which was a
behemoth I didn't want to haul around. I got a small windfall and
spent it on a Zenith 386 sub-notebook with 4MB of RAM... a neat and
tidy little system... VGA wih mono-greyscale LCD but it could hook up
to a monitor. This was the first PC I got FE2 installed on. I was
kinda slightly miffed that it seemed to run it nicer than the Amiga. I
had no sound on it though, so found I played the Amiga version
more.... A year later I got the frankenclone into some reasonable
shape for playing games on, with a 5x86 cpu, 16MB of RAM and 1MB Vesa
graphics, fired up FE2 on it... which ran pretty smooth... but had the
most grating 'orrible midi tunes and sound FX... so even then I was
back to playing it on the Amiga still. Meanwhile, I had a speccy
emulator on the A1200 that ran in a window at up to around 400% native
speed and I would have a windowed game of spectrum Elite going on
while I did other stuff on the workbench (Just think desktop if you've
only known PCs) with the emulation speed at about 150% (and disk
loading and saving of snapshots) I found spectrum elite rather more
playable than it had been on the old rubbertop 48k.
Somehow, I missed out on the original release of FFE, I think the
magazines I was reading at the time suggested it was no great upgrade
over FE2, and that a good spec system was required for it. So I was
just an FE2er into the late 90s. By the time the millenium rolled
round, I'd moved to Canada and sadly left my A1200 stored in the UK. I
was missing FE2 and mostly played it from time to time on the now aged
386 lappy. Seemed eerie somehow with no sound. As I got myself a
halfway good PC system built over here, and got around online again, I
began hearing more about FFE and wasn't long before I got the
shareware version installed and running. Then I got to retrieve my
trusty A1200, but due to moves, lack of time and organisation, it's
still packed up waiting for me to get a chance to get it set up nice
for some oldskool FE2ing. So it's been about 6 years or so I've been
playing FFE from time to time. Mostly on another laptop I got, a P150
compaq with audio. The bug bites every few months or so and I'd drag
it out and play away. Lately though the lappy got too glitchy to run,
seems to have a fractured contact in the expansion RAM SODIMM socket
but it's just about impossible to get at with a soldering iron, so
without reflowing the sucker it's basically unfixable. Have a lot of
spare parts I could make a classic dos gaming rig out of, but have had
that lack of time, space and organisation thing still.
So a couple of weeks ago, I was playing around with my newer lappy, a
turion with XP, and came across the back-up of my old lappies drive,
and my FFE install.... of course it wouldn't run, tried dosbox, got
that memory permission error, then found JJFFE and have been happily
cruising the spacelanes again. Found the laptops keyboard a PITA and
the wide screen a little odd, so copied it to the desktop machine (AMD
tbred@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
512MB GF4200 Win98SE) to play on instead, and rediscovered
the joy of individual thruster control.... so that has had me looking
online for more more more, and I just fetched up here (again?)
Anyhoo, greets and hi to all, kudos and propos to all who keep the
elite scene going online with the updated executables, addons,
utilities and excellent web pages, and the originators of our "Matrix
of choice" Messrs Braben and Bell, a big thank you,
Road Warrior
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