Ancestors

Written by Mark Moxon on 2025-01-06 at 19:16

New Elite deep dive: All about the BBC Micro disc version

Find out how Bell and Braben harnessed cutting-edge 1980s floppy disc technology to make Elite even fancier.

(For the rich kids, anyway. Lucky sods!)

https://elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/docked_and_flight_code.html

[#]retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #apple #nes #bbcmicro #elite

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from markmoxon@universeodon.com

Toot

Written by David Matthewman on 2025-01-06 at 21:23

@markmoxon Fascinating read! I lost several days as a sixth-former to the disc version, although I remember becoming increasingly frustrated that although I had furnished my ship with a rear-facing mining laser, no asteroids ever appeared for me to mine. Which I gather is a bug that was given later.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from djm4@mastodon.me.uk

Descendants

Written by Mark Moxon on 2025-01-06 at 21:57

@djm4 Yeah, the first release never spawned any asteroids - they'd manually added a jump instruction to force traders to spawn, so they could test that bit of the code, but they forgot to take it out again for the release, so asteroids were broken. Oops! Though the same version also had a bug where you could make endless money by refunding lasers, so at least there was an upside.

Here's the code responsible for your asteroid anguish, just over half way down in the blue IF...ENDIF block:

https://elite.bbcelite.com/disc/flight/subroutine/main_game_loop_part_2_of_6.html

Just a 3-byte mistake: software development was pretty harsh back then!

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from markmoxon@universeodon.com

Written by David Matthewman on 2025-01-06 at 22:08

@markmoxon I remember the refunding lasers bug, now that you mention it. But I was too honest (and a bit too worried about losing my clean legal status) to use it!

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from djm4@mastodon.me.uk

Written by Mark Moxon on 2025-01-06 at 22:19

@djm4 Ha! Good for you. Exploiting that one was definitely cheating!

Interestingly, the competition code stored the version details, so if you submitted a competition entry from the bugged version, Acornsoft would have known. It didn’t record whether the bug had been exploited, but I bet they took the version number into account when awarding prizes…

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from markmoxon@universeodon.com