Viewing profile — MarkMoxon

Thank you, that's a good point. The site started off with just the BBC Micro version, and I never expanded the book references to be clearer. Anyway, I have reworded every referenc…

Glad you like it! I’ve been working on this for nearly five years, along with my other software archaeology projects - I started in May 2020, back in lockdown. It’s a true labour o…

Thank you! I came at it from the BBC Micro angle, which was the system I grew up with, and I have to say that analysing Elite been a brilliant way to learn about other 8-bit platfo…

I keep a list of everything that isn’t 100% clear in my commentary, here: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/to-do_list.html This is not a big list, and these are all pretty sub…

Well, exactly. This project is a hobby, and I’d like to try to keep it as my happy place! Besides, I’ve published PDFs of my travel writing sites, and the thought of trying to keep…

Honestly, for me personally and on this specific project with its specific history of copyright issues (look it up!), that would be crossing the line into disrespecting the copyrig…

Yeah, it's a bit tricky when the code you are documenting is copyright, and you aren't the copyright owner. Website is one thing, but publishing a book? I suspect that is asking fo…

This should answer your question: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/about_this_project.htm... Some parts of Elite were documented prior to my project, particularly the procedur…

Oolite is normally quoted at this point. I think it's in Objective C? But exactly how much it relates to the original game's code, I don't know. https://github.com/OoliteProject/oo…

The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work. You can use …

Yes. The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work.

All NOPs should be explained in the commentary, apart from the ones in the fast loader routine in the elite-gma1.asm file. Are these the ones you mean? If so, I haven't documented …

No, the Cougar is nothing to do with missions (in the 6502 versions, anyway - the other platforms have different mission code). It's just a rarely called part of the random spawnin…

It is in-game, but it is astonishingly rare. Specifically, there is a 0.011% chance of spawning a Cougar during each ship spawning routine, which is around 1 in 9000 ship spawnings…

Yup. "Never fly without a rebuy", as they say!

That's not fear, it's an indication of the respect in which I hold the original authors (whom I believe are still the copyright holders). If Bell or Braben asked me to take it this…

Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Check 3 only looks to see if we are moving backwards into the station slot. This is a bit pointless to calculate as falling backwards would mean…

I love the BASIC assembler on the BBC Micro and Archimedes. It is a work of art. Incidentally, the fully buildable Lander source code in the website's accompanying git repository i…

OK, I guess if Braben says it's a demo, then it's a demo - fair point! I still think it's a harsh term, especially when Lander has features that Zarch doesn't, and a really differe…

I've always felt that calling Lander a "demo" was harsh. It's a fully featured game in itself, and has features that Zarch doesn't (such as falling rocks and hover mode). Yes, Zarc…

That's a good point - I wondered what the correct term was, and Fourier synthesis makes a lot more sense! I will update the article accordingly; thank you for pointing that out.

It is procedurally generated (of course it is, this is David Braben we’re talking about!). I’ve written a deep dive on how it works, here: https://lander.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/ge…

Yeah, I’ve had to add the same disclaimer to all my analyses of old code (e.g. Elite, Revs, Aviator). I’m not sure there’s any other solution - the original copyright owners still …

In terms of scale, there is the concept of the tile size, which is set to 0x01000000, and everything uses the same coordinate units, so it’s possible to extrapolate this to give so…

The coordinates of the shadow are calculated here: https://lander.bbcelite.com/source/main/subroutine/drawobjec... and they are drawn here: https://lander.bbcelite.com/source/main/…