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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

I have been trying to get into Elite as part of my retro-gaming hobby, but so far my particular combination of free time + learning-motivation-levels are like "best I can do is Space Trader for Palm".

I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander, etc.

Still, I love seeing the proliferation of things like this into Emacs. The psychology of Elite-type games has a strong propagation bonus factor within general tech psychology. It's like if you view tech as a mandelbrot set, you zoom in and you can start to see these little Elite wings all over.

(From recent discussions it seems like Lite-XL ought to enable this kind of effort too? Being SDL based and anything-goes on the scripting side, I'd just hazard a guess)

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Space trader for palmos is the bomb! I spent way way too many hours playing that.

.. I may have that on my current android phone using a palmos emulator. There’s also an actual android port of it too though.

Did you ever get to play the leaked Elite 3D port for palmos? The dev couldn’t get rights for release so abandoned it. I cracked and released it after that. I was a beta tester. It’s a hoot. Works well. Even has a plug-in for the vibrator on the Palm M5xx series.

That's a good point about Android, I think I play the FDroid one or something like that.

I never saw the Elite 3D you mentioned, sounds great. How was the color palette? Just curious if it was more monochrome or colorful.

I was probably hitting the Cybiko Xtreme really hard at that time, having all but given up on gaming on my HP Jornada and finding some relief in the KayBee Toys clearance bin ;-)

I do have a bunch of space trading games ready to go here for when the right time comes, and I like to leave the Elite Plus attract screen open in a DOSBox window sometimes...

Always wanted a cybiko. Had a jornada 720! Great devices for the time.

The game is very colorful. I loved it. Here’s the original website for it.

http://www.harbaum.org/till/palm/elite/index.html

And apparently he either released or something else a v1.0 with the source code and it is up here:

https://palmdb.net/app/elite-palm

I didn’t know this copy existed till a few minutes ago. I’ve only played the one I had which was a version 0.9.5 or 9.7 iirc. So now I’m curious to test this out.

Oh that's pretty. Looks fun, thanks for sharing the links too. Amazing how far they took it on the platform, including Sony Clie multi-track audio!

Can you imagine it on like the Tapwave Zodiac? I wish i kept mine. Palmos game system. Analog joystick and all. Was so awesome.

You don't even need a native emulator! CloudpilotEmu works great, and runs in any modern browser. You'll need to supply your own ROM, but those aren't hard to come by these days.

I did not get to play the 3d version. I'd love to try it out on my old TX, if you happen to know where a .prc might be found... ;)

> I'm annoyed that I never gave it the extra push when I was a kid, preferring Silent Service, Aces of the Pacific, Strike Commander, etc.

Why annoyed? Those are all excellent games to have spent time with. I still have very fond memories of Strike Commander, and even learned a thing or two about real jet fighters and their weapons with it.

For modern computers: remember there's always the Oolite project :)

Take privateer first the "gemini gold edition" ;)

https://privateer.sourceforge.net/

Tried it but can't get it to start due to an issue with parsing the config, it looks like.

~/.alsoftrc:

> (define devices '(arts esd native))

Not sure what to do but it's segfaulting when trying to work with that.

Linux? If yes try the windows version with wine. (the better linux runtime for games)

Or simply delete the "artsd" string and Pulseaudio with ESD support will do its magic.

Yes and don't have a filesystem with inode64...but hey it's much easier to just use wine for every game, native linux games are a joke (with the usual exceptions).

Define "joke". Bakc in the day a lot of people played emulated games from SNES/MD/MAME and webs like Newgrounds and alikes in Spanish (Minijuegos) than former AAA games. Later, lots of people were into Ogame.

On these libre games, such as Slashem, OOLite,OpenTTD, VegaStrike, Battle for Wesnoth and such a lot of people played more hours than they would acknowledge.

BTW, VegaStrike it's native and available on the distros.

I don't talk about opensource distro embedded games.

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