Archimedes Elite: control of ship

We have a copy of Archimedes Elite which was released on Ian Bell’s web site some time ago, and which runs on our Risc PC.

I’ve not really tried it till recently. When I had a go I found the ship was almosr uncontrollable (either with keyboard or mouse) because when you spin to the left or right, or use the controls to dive or climb, it just carries on in the same direction until you pull back by exactly the same amount, and as it’s quite sensitive, it’s very hard to get it to stop.

The version of Elite I am used to was on the Amstrad CPC, and that had an option for damping of the controls. This means that when you released the key to spin left, it would fairly swiftly return the ship to not spinning. Similarly releasing the key-press after diving, the controls of the Cobra would return to the middle so that the ship is going straight ahead.

Is there a method of turning this sort of behaviour on when playing Archimedes Elite? It doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the documentation and it doesn’t appear as an option in Choices.

I’ve no idea whether the original BBC B version had damping or not. I suspect it may have been added when other 8-bit ports were created.

Ooer! You caused be to look through my old stuff and first version I’ve come across is the BBC one. I bet that tape is in excellent condition (not). According to the crib card, keyboard damping can be toggled by pressing Caps Lock whilst the game is frozen. Maybe the same for the Archimedes version?

Edit: Found the Hybrid-Archimedes version. Description of the controls in the manual is minimal so no help.

The BBC-version may have had damping, but I certainly wasn’t aware. My finger muscles still remember how to stop climbing or rotating and the such, by pressing the opposite key and then immediately release them both (and that’s nearly 40 years ago).
By the way, did you ever consider to buy Elite Dangerous? It’s absolutely breathtaking.

IIRC there’s a version of Arc Elite on acornarcade which contains suitable things to slow the game down when used on more modern machines (like SA RPC). My guess would be that the game is over-sensitive because it’s running faster than intended.

https://www.iconbar.com/downloads/

Elite is listed there. It may be the same version that you downloaded, I don’t know.

At a guess, it may have been timed to Mode 15 refresh rate (25hz or 50hz maybe) so when played on a modern monitor on RiscPC it could be significantly faster. Either that or it is CPU-speed related.

But, I stress, it is probably 15 years since I last looked at that. I could be talking utter nonsense. And no, don’t say “what’s new?”!

1. Try changing your mouse multiplier before running the game.
2. Get one of these… that’s how I Elited it.

My trackerball is Marconi-badged. Still works on my RISC PC after other mice gave up…

Built like the proverbial battleship. I built one into an A3000-based arcade game cabinet that was installed at The Beatles Story Museum in Liverpool for a decade or more (it’s long gone now, this was early 90s). The expensive “arcade” fire buttons would last about a year or so, but that trackerball never failed.

The hard disc on the A3000 did though, as it turned out that Watford were shipping 2A discs with a 1A floppy power supply. Thanks, Watford.

Caps-Lock turns on rotation dampers in ArcElite.

as it turned out that Watford were shipping 2A discs with a 1A floppy power supply.

One of their many customer related wheezes.
Didn’t they end up with one wheeze too many as far as the tax man was concerned and thus fully earn their nickname?

I first met Marconi Trackerballs when the Domesday Project (that I bought for the Gibson Centre in Stornoway) turned up with one. Wonderful beast, I bought one for myself when I got the first computer I actually owned – an A5000. Then insisted that copy editors at Physiology at least tried one for a week to see if they preferred them to a mouse (also easier on the desk space…) – not a single copy editor was prepared to give up their Trackerball once they’d tried them.

When the Physiological Society finally gave up on Acorns, I bought the entire system for a song – including 12 trackerballs, a few of which I still have (the rest have gone to other enthusiasts). I’ve converted a couple of them to PS2 for use with PCs (http://clive.semmens.org.uk/DIY/Project5188.html), but I haven’t yet got round to converting one to USB for the Pi…

Thanks for the Caps Lock tip: exactly what I wanted.

The game still runs a bit fast, I think. We haven’t yet managed to land more than a couple of shots on attacking ships before they blast us completely.

I tried two versions from the Iconbar download link.

>Caps-Lock turns on rotation dampers in ArcElite.<

Thanks for the tip. I searched hours in the internet for other program versions. Nothing works.

Now it is playlable on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ with Risc OS 5.28.

Many thanks.

Micky

Micky,
did you have to do anything tricky to get that to run on a pi?
I am working towards it. My kid was playing Elite Dangerous in VR and reading the manual from the BBC version the other day.
I had to find disc drive and teach him shit-break. I was pleased to find it had bit-stick support. He was astounded that it was the same game and you had to do all the same things a good number of the space ships were the same though they have a few more than 10 vertices now.
I think he is on a bit of a campaign to see how many different machines he can find a version for so the A540 is the next one, it will be interesting to see if the bit-stick will work with its IOPodule, I changed the 6522 to a newer one which I hope fixes its issues with ARM3 so this will be a good test, then we are going to try the RISC PC and then a PI (phew I though i was in the wrong forum there for a minute).
Alan

You must install !Arcem because the Elite versions that I know did not run under Risc OS 5.28.

Or you can install !Beeblt then you take the Elite version for the BBC Micro computer.

Micky

@Alan Ignoring your toilet pauses typo, the original version ships didn’t have concave surfaces, so hidden line removal was a simple matter of (if my memory serves) a cross-product calculation on to edge vectors being +ve or -ve. (The 256×256 b/w screen resolution also helped speed things up.)