Just for fun...

[PeteD]

Yeah, works for me in A800win 4.0

 

 

Pete

[miker]

Works here, too.

 

Btw. it seems that faster linedraw routine may come handy.

[Tezz]

Looking very good so far Mark. Excellent.

[Wrathchild]

Thanks!

 

I still need to drop the C64 title screen from this version and restore the original code which renders the title.

 

Also I wanted to guage people's ideas on what needs to be done with regards to the console.

 

For the screens where it is not needed, I can follow the C64 approach and just not show it. For example, the maps & buying/selling screens.

 

When in front/rear/side views though, we have the option of

1) leaving the full height (192 lines) of the BBC game and use the 'toggle console' approach. This may not be so practical when playing the game though so here are the other two options.

2) having the console permanently on and changing the view transformation matrices to those used by the C64 which would result (I think) in the Y being squeezed to fit into the top area (which would become 200-5*8=160 lines)

3) (my current favourite) use 2 when the console is on but allow it to be toggled to 'full-screen' BBC mode with no console.

 

There maybe other options, feel free to suggest

[PeteD]

Console is a pain, beeb stuff in general is a pain when it goes to 256 lines. You can do 240 lines on A8, you could either change the matrix to use the rest of the space or leave it as is and maybe skip some lines using LMS ?

 

If not, I'd forget it on side view, they're fairly useless views to do anything in, maybe the same for rear apart from if you're trying to shoot someone behind you (same could be said for side, but have you ever tried? lol nightmare)

 

 

Pete

[Wrathchild]

Historically I only begun playing Elite when I had an 1040STE, my memory is hazy but I think I used to use side lazers for mining.

 

As an aside, and to fill in some history for readers of the thread, whilst at uni I had a C64 for a few years. Two other of my favourite games for this came from the 'Supreme Challenge' compilation I'd bought to get Elite, these were The Sentinel (still a possible for conversion) and Tetris (great tune!).

 

I think I mentioned this in the past somewhere on AtariAge, but at that time I also borrowed an Replay cart thing from my friend. This had a monitor mode that displayed memory content a single line at a time (8 bytes a line IIRC). Using this I hand typed across into my STE all of the HEX values from the C64 memory for Elite. Then with EMACS I hand edited this to put the right number of hex bytes per line depending on the instruction (I had a good memory for thes then, doubt I could do it now!). Next I wrote a macro that would then convert each line into a mnemonic and correct immediate/address reference. Once done I had a listing that I could study and slowly come to understand a few bits of how it worked.

 

Actually programming wise one thing I recall I learnt from Braben/Bell's coding style, that I'd not seen before, was the use of a 'BIT' command to ignore the next statement, e.g.

Do4:
 LDA #4
 .BYTE $2C ; BIT abs
Do2:
 LDA #2
 .BYTE $2C ; BIT abs
Do1:
 LDA #1
 STA xyz

I used to do this, so their way saved a couple of bytes!

Do4:
 LDA #4
 BNE SetXyz
Do2:
 LDA #2
 BNE SetXyz
Do1:
 LDA #1
SetXyz:
 STA xyz

 

Life took over after starting working full-time in 1992 and I didn't pick this up again until around 1999/2000 when I got involved in getting CC65 (www.cc65.org) back working, with others, to cross compile binaries for the A8. Elite was one of the reasons for doing this as to have a play with Palm Pilot development I'd tried different ways of 'spinning' the Elite Cobra MK.III around on the Palm, inticing myself back to have a crack at the A8 port.

 

Once succeeding in getting the spinning ship working on the Atari emulator (possibly sometime in 2001, I'd need to check) my first daughter's problems then developed and progressing things fell off when I'd got stuck on working out how to replace the C64 key handler. After fun things like FlashCarts came along and I took on the challenge of doing things such as the 'tricky' cart ports (due to them having their own SIO routines) of 'Koronis Rift' and 'The Eidolon', having the focus to get back into continuing Elite didn't materialize until I saw news of the 25th Anniversary. With xxl proving that BBC ports were possible I thought I'd take a look as I was working away from home and thought it far more productive than going to the hotel's gym of an evening! The results of these efforts documented on this thread, I'd backed off when the contract came to an end and have distracted myself with some 5200 conversions until picking this up again recently due to being inspired by reading lots about Elite in RetroGamer of late.

 

Enjoy,

Mark

[PeteD]

You could take a pop at passing stuff with the sides but the rotation is all wrong for actually tracking anything, I think it's yaw that you'd need? rotation around the Y axis (y being up).

 

Damn, I thought I did some crazy stuff back in the day, but hand typing ram from one machine to another?!?!

 

 

Pete

[Wrathchild]

It got more crazy/efficient as I hacked up a joystick cable to connect ports from the C64 to the A8, using a short nibble pushing routine (again entered into the C64 via the Replay monitor) to get data from the C64 and a listening app on the A8 I grabbed things such as the 'eye' picture from The Sentinel but as we had no G2F in those days trying fix this up in something like Atari Artist was ni-on-impossible

[tearex]

A dumb question... i just stumbled across this thread, and maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

 

Is there a disk image of the latest Elite conversion posted above, EliteBBC_v8_AtariMax_FlashRom.zip to be exact? I'd like to try it on the real thing (130XE) but don't own that FlashROM beast, or anything else of that sort. Just a plain 130XE with tape recorder and 1050 disk drive.

 

Or is it for some reason impossible to run it from disk, for example because it needs too much memory to run from RAM?

[Wrathchild]

It was a conscious move to cart due to the overlays used in the game (in station, in space) and to add title/music. I could try and make a disk version minus title and music but A8 time is few and far between at the moment.

[tearex]

It was a conscious move to cart due to the overlays used in the game (in station, in space) and to add title/music. I could try and make a disk version minus title and music but A8 time is few and far between at the moment.

 

Glad if you could, eventually! Of course I don't have the "right" to ask for this, but you'll have to admit that it is unfortunate when Elite finally comes to the A8, and then it doesn't... because you need some special hardware to run it.

 

Just to understand this better, what is the problem with a disk version? Too little RAM or too little Disk space? Shouldn't a 130XE with 180KB drive have enough of both? Or is speed the problem? Probably I'm totally besides the point, though.

 

Thanks for answering!

[Lord Thag]

Goddamn. His Dark Majesty, then that awsome DK hack a post or two above, and now freakin' Elite in the works! I'll play that for hours if it gets done. Man, I love that game.

 

I got my MyIDE this week too. What did 8-bit christmas come early this year?

[Wrathchild]

...what is the problem with a disk version?

 

When making a disk version you need to decide whether or not you are using a DOS (and if so which one) or do you simply always put specific blocks of game data/code at certain sector offsets and then load them yourself with OS I/O calls.

 

Sometimes there is a conflict there as the DOS path means that some code needs to be loaded and take up your precious RAM and both methods require some register overhead (e.g. in zeropage). When doing porting of other games, there is a good chance that these will overlap with where your game code wants to go and so you'd have to work around that. With the cart I'm more in control as I don't have these considerations.

 

Also, you need an extra stage to your build process in order to 'make' the disk image from your 'parts' and also you typically need some kind of bootloader to get things going.

 

Regards,

Mark

[+JAC!]

Big respect Mark!

 

I remember when I compiled a 6502 disassembler (downloaded via modem) on my Amiga 500 to re-engineer the C64 binary an adapt it for my Atari back in 1993. Today it seems I really must have had an incredible amount of spare time. I spent almost 2 months collecting binary table locations and giving hints to the disassembler before I gave up.

 

There are so many games of which I whish I had the sources. Amazing to see they were relased for Elite and even more amazing to see what you made of them

[+JAC!]

Haha, I couldn't resist and booted my old Amiga backup in WinUAE and found that it was even worse: I had tried to create the disassembler by hand in 68k assembler. I used a hand crafted hints table to tell where in the Elite Image is code and where not. If you look at the last entries you'll see what Mark meant and probably why I gave up afterwards

 

	dc.w	id_dis		;DISASM
dc.w	$b07c,$b6ef
dc.w	id_t16b		;JmpTab_4_LO
dc.w	$b6f0,$b6fe
dc.w	id_t16b		;JmpTab_4_HI
dc.w	$b6ff,$b70d

;===============================================================
dc.w	id_db		;db $2c
dc.w	$2339,0
dc.w	id_db		;db $2c
dc.w	$278b,0
dc.w	id_db		;db $2c
dc.w	$27bb,0
dc.w	id_db		;db $2c
dc.w	$27c4,0
dc.w	id_db		;db $2c

ReSourceV0.2.S.txt

[+Philsan]

Hi Mark!

 

Any news regarding your awesome Elite port?

[AlegisDownport]

Seconded!

 

Loved Elite on the ZX Spectrum, then on the ST (including Frontier). Just found this thread, the project shows a lot of promise!

[_The Doctor__]

bump

[Wrathchild]

 

Focus went back to the C64 version, moving from a demo that looped through the details of a few planets to now incorporating the hey handler mapping. That now has issues once you've left the station that need looking into.

 

One this that happened when doing this was that the key handler was improved to handle the key repeats in a better way and so what would be good is to push those changes back to the BBC version so that the gameplay 'in space' experience is better.

 

[Edit] At the moment I am trying to pinpoint an annoying bug in the 5200 port of Mr Do! and have also almost completed porting Stealth to the same platform so will need to wrap those up.

Edited October 11, 2018 by Wrathchild

[+Philsan]

Hi Mark!

 

Perhaps yesterday Acorn Electron commented source code release could help you @Wrathchild ?

 

https://www.bbcelite.com/