I'm a silver surfer!

[robinturner]

The delectable Sevi on the BBC's Click Online just introduced websites for "silver surfers" by saying "for those of you who remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon." So it's official - I'm a silver surfer! Personally, I prefer the term "old-school geek" - one of those grumpy old guys with a pony tail who say things like:

"You want a word processor? What's wrong with vi?"
"1.5MHz CPU? You must have a hell of a lot of code to compile."
"Well, if you will use Windows ..." [ominous pause]
"When are they going to re-issue Elite? Can't beat those wire-frame graphics."

Comments

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

YOU ARE LIKE SO OLD!

[solri.livejournal.com]

LIKE TOTALLY, DUDE.

Actually, despite my occasional whinings about ageism, I find 40 to be a perfect age. Depending on how I dress and talk, I can do the old codger, "You young people don't know what it's like to use a ZX81 with 1K of RAM," routine, or, if I prefer, I can pass as a student. The last time I left the country, the policeman at passport control said "What are you doing in Turkey, son? Studying?" He must have been at least ten years younger than me.

OTOH, I was taken aback a while ago when one of my students said "I've always looked at you as a father." Eeek.

Grey Panthers, here I come ...

[alienghic.livejournal.com]

I thought some linux hakers managed to come up with some reasonable clones of elite.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Any idea what the clones are called? I've done a number of searches on "Elite" and found that Elite II is planned, but the only downloads I could get were of the DOS version, which is pig-ugly (we thought those 16-bit graphics were pretty impressive back in the 1980s, but really all those pinks and yellows make you want to puke).

[alienghic.livejournal.com]

happypenguin.org lists 3 games related to elite. Terminus, jjffe, and ggelite. Terminus appears to be commercial, jjffe, is a patch to the windows version of frontier: first encounters (aka Elite 3), and the third is an attempt by some solitary programmer to replicate elite.

[solri.livejournal.com]

But none of them have those original BBC green wire-frame graphics!
Elite is the only game that's actually made me hallucinate. Back in 1985 ot thereabouts, I was sitting in a station after playing Elite all night, and suddenly the opposite platform turned into the docking bay.

[alienghic.livejournal.com]

That's kind of cool. Hmm.. Might it be possible to take the open source clone and put the graphics into wireframe mode? Or just run an original copy in an emulator? Or even better a couple of those links lead to some elite fan pages, they might have more useful suggestions.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Rewriting with wireframe graphics would be possible,if you had the original graphic files, but not for me - I'm only up to simple Perl and bash scripting.

Copies of the original are still circulating, apparently - there are still people out there using BBC micros, believe it or not. Actually, for its day, the BBC was an excellent machine, though I remember one reviewer saying "Why would anyone want 32K of RAM in a personal computer?" I managed to write a statistics program (in BASIC!) that actually fitted in there, but the graphics were a nightmare.

[kristian.livejournal.com]

Hey, you don't have to be old to remember the original Elite! I used to play it when I was like, I dunno, 9? or 10? Who knows. A long time ago. I guess it still makes you old though, coz you were probably like, 20. :P

And they have reissued elite! Elite+, Elite II, Frontiers, Frontiers: The First Encounter, and Elite 4 is now in progress. Oh... you wanted LINUX ELITE? Hrrm...