Thread 12096626

These games are still untouched. Elite 2 especially.

The radar alone is ingenious. And yet I've suffered with far worse radar displays in virtually every game that came after, for forty years.

>>12096682
I only played the original a bit. I want to emulate it but I don't know which version is the best. I've heard the BBC Master version is from some people, others say C64.

https://elite.bbcelite.com/compare/feature_comparison.html

This looks like the ticket.

my introduction was the free-slur game Pioneer, back before ED existed. I regret paying $125 for that when it was $2.49 recently.

I've since learned to never pay for a game less than a decade old.

>>12096714
Elite Dangerous is OK I guess. Bought it a while back when it was newish, but I don't play it any more. I got back into Frontier for my space game kicks.

>>12096693
Yeah, I hear the BBC has the best version of the original game. I played the C64 because it was what I had, and it's fine.
There was a sort of "remastered" version on the Amiga, but I haven't played it.

>>12096693
>I only played the original a bit. I want to emulate it but I don't know which version is the best. I've heard the BBC Master version is from some people, others say C64.

I grew up with the C64 one but it's actually not very good due to the C64's terribly slow processor (try flying towards a sun). BBC smokes it for FPS, and then you have the Amiga version with filled polygons if that's your thing.

Maybe it's the right amount of information, visual and written, where your imagination fills in the rest.
Like a Hitchcock movie.
If you dig through the source code, it actually gets disappointing.

>>12097362
elaborate

>>12097376
For example looking at that screenshot you'd think there's an epic battle going on, but in reality NPCs only shoot at player.
I used to think that I was ace at finding those docking stations, in reality you can't not find them, they just pop up when you're at a certain distance from the planet.
To dock all that matters is your speed and angle, you can visually ram into the side of station but if those are right you'll dock. I used to rotate my ship very carefully to align it with the hangar door.
Things like that and then all those mysteries like pirate stations, generation ships, twin stars - none of that is there.

>>12096626 (OP)
Do you mean unreleased Elite 2 on BBC?

>>12099106
It wasn't unreleased, I think they released it for the BBC Master or the SPU.

>>12096626 (OP)
ELITE was inspired by Star Raiders by the way.

>>12099245
neat

>>12097426
It sucks to see through the game's coding.

>>12099425
The code is beautiful, and we can finally put a lot of old urban legends to rest.

Elite 2's mere existence cures these gripes too.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.games/c/btfMoXjXg6w
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.games/c/3RItQFmv00w
good times

Being a space sim fan is suffering. Most neglected genre.

>>12099697
>most neglected
>being able to choose from FOUR concurrently developed games
it's never been better

>>12099707
>FOUR concurrently developed games
All of which are shit.

>>12099713
did i stutter?

>>12099725
Did I? I'm MAD about SPACE SIMS!
RARRRGGHHGGH!!!!!

>>12099697
Just boot up Frontier, it has everything you need. And its single player focused.

There's also Pioneer which started as a Free Frontier clone then veered off into its own direction.

>>12097426
In Archimedes Elite the NPC ships would fight each other.

>>12096697
Color me impressed how feature complete the NES version is

>>12096693
Elite Advanced for Amiga. It's a modification of Elite and restores all the Archimedes content.

>>12096626 (OP)
>Elite 2 especially
Glfrontier makes it fairly easy to run it on modern hardware.

>>12100681
Wow that actually looks really cool

>>12100696
Yeah, the hires vistas are kinda neat

>>12100681
>high-rez viewport
>low-rez cockpit displays
that looks... bad.

>>12096626 (OP)
built for BBC

>>12100725
Yeah it can only transform the vectors to conventional 3d, buggily, and it has no power over all the hardcoded elements. It's a shame.

>>12100681
>>12100696
There is NOTHING else that captures the feeling of trawling the vast emptiness of space as well as Frontier. Of returning home from an extended mining expedition with a hull full of precious metals, seeing Saturn's rings pass by, approaching the busy orbital station with Mussorgsky's Great Gates of Kiev pounding out of your Logik speakers ... Bliss

>>12100725
Only if you're autistic

>>12101119
The time acceleration thing is brilliant.

>>12101119
What about Elite Dangerous?

>>12101347
I bought it I was so excited. I have a HOTAS for flying Xplane, a throttle and stick with a bunch of switches and dials on each unit. I bought the game and enjoyed it for a while but the lame ass way you have to travel coupled with the complete lack of any players outside a core area makes it feel hollow. I know they do events and story items but it's just all kinda designed to suck more money out of your pocket with each major update (which costs a tip).

I must say that the actual ships and ship combat is good, but not as good as Frontier. Range is ass with everything comparatively. In Frontier you can smoke people a thousand KM away through your telescope. Dangerous is much more arcadey in every single aspect and does not strive to be a space simulator but more of an exciting and arcade-y experience.

TLDR just play Frontier unless you hate actual space simulation.

>>12101373
>Elite Dangerous is arcadey
>not a good sim
nigga how autistic are you? The one thing everyone praises ED for is being a fantastic sim despite being a shitty game.

>>12097426
That's wrong, at least partly. Cops will fight pirates and etc. You're just talking about the very most basic original version which lacked a lot of improvements. The best Elite is Acorn Elite which has secret ships and generation ships and all kinds of added easter eggs.

>>12101375
How is it a sim? Flight control is arcade style, that's the huge one right there. You can switch on a Newtonian model but it's nothing like Frontier or Elite.

Other issues like, the game happens in real time and jumping is lame and it takes fucking forever to travel. Frontier simulates the insanely long times well, but includes the time compression feature which will stop when you get near another body. It's perfect. And if you're going into deep space it's no longer an MMORPG, not really. There's no players in deep space.

Trust me bro I've played the shit out of that game already. I got bored and switched back to Frontier.

I'm old and played Frontier in the '90s when it was new. As well as many flight and space sims when they were new, X-wing, Descent, I've bought like several X-Plane versions over the years.

Trust me when I say Dangerous is not an interesting or deep game. With Frontier you never know what to expect. It's crazy. Weird things happen, the game is entirely procedural of course but it feels much more alive and dynamic than Dangerous.

>>12101381
>>12101382
I totally agree that ED is a boring game which is why I was wondering how Frontier compares. To me it seems just like ED with worse graphics and I figured people only liked it at the time because such a game was novel. Is it really more fun to actually play?

>>12101390
Dangerous now has mining and FPS planet landing type shit, but it doesn't add to the game, it's just more tedium. Frontier had mining bots and it was a lot more slick, plus there was no need to deal with walking from place to place on some planet. It's not a walking simulator, it a space simulator.

ED sort of warped over time into a complete re-implementation of Battlecruise 3000 AD by Dr. David Smart, which if you don't know who that is or what the game is, you should look up. You won't be disappointed. Anyway the 'everything space war epic opera simulator' concept was already completely done several times, online and single player. But sometimes as Dieter Rams said, less is more.

>>12096626 (OP)
>the sun effect
>fly too close and it starts to interfere with the whole viewscreen and in some versions your console too

Freelancer ruined Space Sims.

>>12100586
It's one of the most amazing NES games for sure. Probably the most amazing. Most people were packing in sprites and music, these guys were doing wire-frame 3D and millions of stars.

>>12101412
How could anything ruin anything? This is a trans-coded perspective.

The communities have already rejected nu-stuff and tranny co-opters. Elite is pure and can't be ruined by some other faggot gayme.

>>12101416
lmao, you had to be there, kiddo.

>>12101418
No this can't be accepted, it's not a real argument. No amount of trannies screeching or pretending to like something can ruin it. Official corporate-branded remakes can't ruin some old movie you're fond of. You're mentally ill and need to conform, it's an NPC moment from you.

>o-oh gee somebody i don't like likes something i like? it's totally ruined forever now!

Who even thinks like this in real life? I know you're trying to model here but it's not going to take, it's retarded.

>trannies breathe air! air is now un-based

>>12101421
autistic newfag gibberish.

>>12101119
>Gatesits 'Great Gates of KYIV', Chud

>>12101426
Why can't thirdied understand English? This board is suffering under a Hindoo invasion lol.

>>12101462
oh, we went from trannies to NPCs to jeets? newfag bingo card is filling up.

>>12101472
the topic is Elite, not your nonsense about how if a tranny likes something or some other game exists, Elite is therefore 'ruined'

now shoo, go get outta here, your shit's stale and retarded, nobody wants your handheld nor do they want you MISTer, i know what you're doing you subhuman

>>12101476
>moar autistic newfag gibberish
delicious tears

>>12101482
He's right, though. Why would someone you don't like liking something ruin it?

>>12101530
Chinks, including Taiwanese, are bug people and can't understand such a question, nor can the Hindoostani.

Their job is to influence you and if doesn't take they just disrupt the thread.

>>12101530
>someone i don't like liking something
autistic gibberish

>>12101482
Sega System coded comment.

>>12099441
This. Elite 2 will probably never really be topped. It's like M.U.L.E. - nothing needs to be added or taken away.

Also I might add, Elite Dangerous is trash, DO NOT BUY.

>>12102531
It blows. I'd rather play the original one.

>>12096626 (OP)
They're two almost completely different games.
Elite 1 has arguably been topped many times in different ways depending what exactly you want from that kind of game.
There is really no modern successor to Elite 2 since Dangerous chose to cripple the Newtonian flight and Pioneer is janky open source shit so you're better off playing the original.

>>12101414
Still waiting for a 60hz nes version...

I want to like Elite but I just don't.
>huge procedurally generated universe, unique for its time
>no incentive to travel anywhere beyond the starting few planets.
>cool sci-fi premise: proximity to mass blocks your hyperdrive, forcing you to slow down
>this just results in minutes of tedious taxiing
It really feels like a game you need to have played as a kid, with an active imagination and an expectation of there being more things to discover.

>>12101414
>the most amazing NES game is a BBC Micro port
yeah, sounds about right

>>12103117
The manual and the novella that came with the box famously quite literally lied about things you could supposedly find in the game. So people back in the day had the incentive to explore. It was fuelled further by playground rumours of all the fantastic things that lying kids had found at the edges of the galaxy and even further bullshit spewed by lying british game journos.
It was all fucking lies. It was a sweet fantasy, but hard to relive it now that everyone knows how simple and empty the game really is. Elite 2 was really just the electric boogaloo of that but the physics-based flying at least was really cool.
ED is kind of boring but in its credit there actually are some cool things you can find.

>>12096626 (OP)
The Escape Velocity games are fun Elite-like games and still worth playing, but they're overhead 2d instead of 3d cockpit view and with a smaller universe but with unique systems instead of procedurally generated. There's no better feeling than finding a good trade route and hiring a bunch of freighters to haul extra cargo.

>>12103083
How is Pioneer janky? It runs great. Are you a WinJeet?

>>12103127
>It was all fucking lies.
see
>>12096697

Depended entirely on the version you played. Some versions had all kinds of wacky stuff added on.

>>12103353
Those things were added to the newer ports, while the manual claimed they were in the original game. Many things in the manual, like generation ships and space dredgers, never got added anywhere (until the sequels).

>>12103404
>while the manual claimed they were in the original game
So? Manuals are often written concurrently with the game, perhaps they meant to put those things in but couldn't for time / space constraints, and made up for it by including easter eggs in the later versions?

Anyway it's a poor gripe. It'd be like hating that gay Mario jumping game for the N64 because you found out that each copy isn't "personalized" like you heard on Reddit lol.

>>12101382
Dangerous was fun with PvP and the whole VR helmet compatibility but the devs decided players were having too much fun Larping as if they were playing Eve Online and nerfed everything that supported PvP into the ground. Even stuff like carriers became unmanageable.
>>12101390
If Elite isn't your jam then maybe Descent? It is freeware and fans made a modern compatbile package so you can just grab it and play.

>>12103556
Elite Dangerous is not Elite, anon. It's an arcade MMORPG boredom simulator. It sucks.

>>12103353
Almost nobody had Archimedes.

>>12103704
What's your thesis though?

>>12103168
ΔV: Rings of Saturn is peak if you like overhead 2D.
>>12103352
It looks like shit and the combat isn't anything like the real game due to their insistence on slow moving projectiles instead of proper beam weapons.

>>12096626 (OP)
play Star Glider 2

>>12103438
The gripe isn't that they lied, but that there's next to nothing to do or find in the game really. Not even the dumb stuff the manual writers dreamt about.

>>12099245
>released in 1979
d a m n

>>12103725
>atari st
feels like i can never get it running, got any advice anon?

>>12103740
Try the Amiga or DOS versions?

>>12103106
What do you mean? ntsc patched rom has been around for 30 years

how about Mercenary III?

>>12103763
I loved the space whales

>>12099707
>FOUR
Three.
Star Citizen is basically a Ponzi scheme at this point.

>>12096626 (OP)
Starglider 2 is better

>>12103924
kino

>>12103730
It was all about getting that Elite rating.

>>12104052
>just play this game where rich Saudi princes have unassailable super-ships from day one
No.

>>12101396
>Dr. David Smart
Derek Smart.

>>12104151
Even that seems pretty grim once you know the actual requirements for it. (6400 kills)

>>12104502
I only got to Deadly before my power supply killed my C64 :(

>>12101841
Someone you dislike likes something you like. Are you mad about it?

Frontier was just as boring and dogshit as Elite Dangerous. The only difference is you were a kid when you played Frontier and used your imagination to fill in the boring procedurally generated space.

>>12101390
It's not like ED. It's much closer to an actual space flight sim, think KSP, expect the ships are ridiculously fuel-efficient and can blast full thrust for weeks meaning they can just ignore orbital dynamics and get to their destination with the old half-way flip method from the rocketpunk golden age of sci-fi.
If you like playing around with Newtonian physics it's gold. Otherwise, it's a bit empty even compared to ED, although the grind is less soul-crushing since it's not an MMO.

>>12103854
It's cool and so are the first two games (you should play them in order because the save transfers and things you did in the previous games affect later events)
But they're more like a weird sort of adventure game than space sims, per se. They deserve credit for attempting to simulate time dilation, though.

>>12099707
Infinity: Battlescape, ΔV and Flight of Nova. What's the fourth one? I thought KSP and CoaDE both stopped development?

>>12100654
That's one of the worst versions of the game to base a hack on. The way the guns work is completely wacky. "Projectiles" instead of beams except they follow the rotation of your ship after they've already left the barrel. And the graphics are so goofy. Why not just play the Arc version instead?

>>12100681
>Elite 2 could do this
>ED still never mastered inhabited planetfall
grim

>>12103763
>>12103854
These are two of my favorite games of all time.
Starglider 2 is arcadey + exploration/item hunt.
Mercenary 2/3 are hyper explorey and something closer to adventure games, with dozens of planets. One of those old games that's mostly empty by necessity of the times yet still super evocative and entertaining, I still love just wandering around in it. There's a modern PC port with an OpenGL renderer though it's kind of hit or miss with how it changes the visuals, I quite like the original style. Seeing the crescents of the other planets made for some very memorable skylines.

They both offer something a bit different from Elite, though. I didn't play the Elite series nearly as much as these games (other than ED, which sucks), but I want to get into it as it seems more like the type of persistent "live in the world" kind of game? Maybe Frontier?

>>12103127

>>12105463
Frontier is the best IMO, but the first and third games are worth playing too. If you enjoy the "land on a minimalistic polygon planet and look at the skyline" aspect of Damocles / Dion Crisis, Frontier scratches much the same itch. As a bonus you can punch on time acceleration and watch as the planets and moons move on their accurate(ish)ly modelled orbits.
The entire series has this similar emptiness as ED but they don't quite suck in the same way IMO. They have this immediacy that is lacking in ED, where you can just shoot an enemy and they fucking die and the missions, if repetitive, at least make sense and there's no one asking you to travel back and forth transporting 500 tons of biowaste to some idiot engineer so they can upgrade your ship to be 3% faster. They're a bit grindy yes but in a way that makes sense and is fair. It's because they're not MMO's trying to artificially inflate their daily active user counts with pointless busywork.

>>12097362
>Maybe it's the right amount of information, visual and written, where your imagination fills in the rest.
>>>12097362
elaborate

pottery

For me, it's FFED3D
https://youtu.be/_rd2oNhYu68?si=DPI7fuXCudymAGQn

>>12099707
What four? Star citizen is a scam. Elite dangerous is a micro transaction nightmare.

>>12100716
I never noticed the inticrate road layout on Amiga or PC before

>>12103740
The Retroarch core is pretty solid
https://docs.libretro.com/library/hatari/
You need a system rom or it won't run at all.
https://www.planetemu.net/roms/atari-st-tos-img
TOS 1.06 is a good start, you might have to rename it like Retroarch wants it.

>>12096626 (OP)
I've yet to play an original version of Elite, but I played the shit out of Oolite when I was in college.
Spent many a night space-trucking goods across galaxies, just pointing my ship in the direction of a station and then reading a book or playing something on GBA until the proximity klaxon went off and action had to be taken.
I found The Dark Wheel online, copied that to a txt file and put it on my GBA linker cartridge to read while playing one time.

>>12105228
>I thought KSP and CoaDE both stopped development?
KSP2 got canned and KSP1's development is dead. There's a "spiritual successor" in development called Kitten Space Agency, but it's being run by the Dean "bad games and empty promises" Hall, aka the DayZ guy, so I expect it to release without flyable rockets and go into early access for a decade, if we're lucky.

I played Frontier on a vanilla Amiga 500. it was 5 FPS but it was a dream come true, a real full on galaxy sim, I ignored the jank.
to play it today at 60 FPS flawlessly is literally a dream come true thats take 20 years to realize.
GOAT space sim

>>12096626 (OP)
I was so fucking disappointed by Elite 2 holy shit. It's like they sucked all the fun and excitement out of it. You click on menus and the ship goes there. Dogfights are gone, you click on targets a million miles away and hope the missile hits whatever that hostile dot was. Absolute shite. I'm glad Wing Commander 1 and 2 existed for us Elite refugees until Roberts went full retard with Wing Commander 3 & 4

>>12106506
You wanted an arcade style game, it turns out. Not a space sim.

>>12106596
Elite was an arcade style game, not a space sim

>>12106678
You're either:
A) Thinking of Defender
or B) An actual retard

>>12106506
>You click on menus and the ship goes there
Only if you're bad and couldn't fly the ship yourself.
>Dogfights are gone, you click on targets a million miles away and hope the missile hits whatever that hostile dot was.
Only if you're bad and couldn't velocity match and keep the enemy in range.

>>12106596
When I think space sim I think of inertial physics, gravity slingshots, and huge distances. In Elite you fly around at a fixed max speed that persists as you turn the ship, and the space station magically appears after a couple minutes of taxiing.
Frontier's decision to accelerate time to 10000x (!) in order to have realistic distances is cool I guess but it's not the same philosophy as Elite, same with the inertial flight

>>12106678
>You wanted a sequel to Elite, not a very different game that shared the name
Okay

>>12106596
>You wanted a sequel to Elite, not a very different game that shared the name
Okay

>>12106845
It's not meant to be the same game. Elite had certain limitations which they were able to overcome on the newer 32-bit computers.

Wish me luck anons, I'm going to fire up FFE on Dosbox. Never played it.

>>12107482
That's kinda beside the point. If you wanted more of Elite, you find that Frontier is very different in fundamental ways.

>>12107513
It's more similar than you think, if you actually understand how to play it. Like, for instance, all these people memeing that the "dogfighting" is gone, but turns out you can in fact fight the enemies in close range using lasers with slow relative velocities if you know how to fly. The enemies even help by literally being programmed to keep the velocity low, but that doesn't do anything if the player is an idiot who keeps blasting full thrust forward when he's already in range.
It isn't quite WW1 style biplanes doing loop-de-loops trying to get in each others "six" but that wasn't really true in Elite 1 either, as the most effective way to fight in that game was installing a rear laser and flying away from the enemies when they concentrated themselves in the middle of your screen where you could pick them off.

I just tried playing Frontier and I'm confused about the autopilot. What's the fucking point then? Are moving planets just for decoration since you autopilot everywhere?

>>12107754
Sell the autopilot and fly manually.
It's not just to be a show off either, you'll get faster to the destination (in-game time) if you flip your ship around and use the main thrusters to brake, which the autopilot doesn't do.
With manual flying you can also try to shake off pursuers by changing your flight path making them overshoot (you can see other ships as colored dots on the map screen)

>>12107761
>as the most effective way to fight in that game was installing a rear laser and flying away from the enemies when they concentrated themselves in the middle of your screen where you could pick them off.
And while the reverse laser trick was one thing, slowing down your ship to near standstill so you can get more shots on the enemy when they pass isn't very dogfighty either, but I guarantee nearly everyone who plays Elite does that. The game would get super boring if the NPC's did the same thing, but they're programmed to lose in an entertaining way so they keep flying at full speed and doing loops for no particular reason other than making them more fun to shoot.

Frontier can get very boring if you choose to easy-mode everything with autopilot, shield tank builds and missiles. That's kind of a flaw of the game, if you want to call it that, it's only challenging and fun if you enforce challenges on yourself like flying without autopilot or using joystick or keyboard instead of mouse. Why not use mouse? Well once you figure out the basic "how to fly without autopilot" part and learn to fight close range you'll notice the NPC ships turn really slowly and have shitty aim. That's because they're apparently balanced for the player not using the mouse.

How does the NES Elite play with 4 buttons + dpad?

Any recommendations for playing an elite/privateer game on a chinkheld that will play up to PS1 (no analog sticks sadly)?

>>12107902
NES Elite has a GUI with little pictograms. It's a decent version.

You can turn engines off in elite ii and dart around them at close range , use forward plus reverse

The problem is that Braben didn’t properly explain it. So retards play the game doing slingshot idiocy

>>12107902
>How does the NES Elite play
Better than you would think. One of the original devs seems to consider it the definitive version.
I like it. It feels very true to the BBC original despite the icon interface. The cute graphics they added to the UI are better than any of the 16-bit versions imo. Solid version.

>>12096626 (OP)
Try Elite Legend OP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSPyQUDxG8
"ersion for 128k with optimized speed-up engine, new fonts, more than fifteen new ships, five new stations, more than twenty new products, new equipment and weapons, new pause menu with lots of extra settings, cargo/passenger transportation market, improved bottom screen display, possibility to change the ship, several new missions, AY and GS sound support, and much more."

I get to play these games on a real CRT. You jelly?

Fyi for emulating NES elite you must run as PAL

All space dogfighting is inherently boring. There is no way to make it entertaining. Even the gold standard, Freelancer, gets boring after the first few encounters.
>Rotate... rotate...... rotate..... shootshootshootshoot!!! speed up.... rotate... rotate... rotate.....

>>12108732
This is the gold standard and it's not boring

>>12108745
Oh, 2D is fine. Subspace Continuum was loads of fun.

>>12108062
The entire point of the game is to let the retards do anything they like.

>>12108732
>Freelancer
Try Discovery

>>12108732
>the gold standard, Freelancer
>Freelancer
>the gold standard
>for space dogfighting
>Freelancer
That's not Freespace 2 + SCP

Why have left/right guns and not dorsal/ventral?

>thread about Elite
>n-no. buy this non-retro game instead
Steam-shill sisters?

>>12103713
I think the game looks fine, though I won't argue the combat being janky.
Pioneer does a pretty good job of evoking the feeling of barreling across the stars, lost in the void without even a rock to use as reference. While it is easy to let the Autopilot take care of flight, I appreciate that the dev team put so much time and effort in to refining and encouraging manual flight. I find it to be a really unique experience, though my frame of reference is admittedly limited.

>>12109385
Pioneer started as an engine to run Frontier, then they sort of took it as a starting point and started changing things and adding ships, at this point it's a completely different game but obviously heavily inspired by Frontier. It's an absolte gem and runs pretty good on my ancient Thinkpad which is cool too.

I can't think of a single reason to play Frontier over Pioneer other than raw nostalgia. Pioneer is just an improvement on every facet of the game.

Pioneer is kino.

>>12109212
Isn't this unplayable trash because it's populated by 4channers?

>>12109673
They fixed a number of bugs in Pioneer that are crucial to navigation. Due to a bug in a math routine you could 'warp' in Frontier, it would only count as minimum distance for fuel and if you got out your star charts and found a 2-3 hop route you could jump practically anywhere in the galaxy regardless of distance. Without warping you're in for some very tedious flying if you want to cross a couple hundred light years.

I just prefer the visual aesthetic of Frontier. Pioneer's 2000s openglslop appearance does nothing for me.

>>12109805
You should play Frontier: First Encounters, which seems to be less popular than Frontier: Elite II even though it's literally improved in every single way. If you loved Frontier you will love FFE even more.

Better graphics, better sound, more stuff to do, storylines and missions, newspapers to read with clues for missions and animated multimedia video action in the classifieds and stores, more ships plus some classics... it's great. Seriously you should give it a shot, if you feel you've gotten pretty great at Frontier it will give you a lot more to actually DO.

>>12109805
>pixelated aliased mess
unless you're playing on a crt or a good OLED with shaders miss me with that shit

>>12109938
Your post is completely irrelevant to me.

>>12109938
You shared your opinion, I shared mine. That's called conversation, autismo.

>>12109938
VGA actually looks like that, it's a lot blockier and hi-fi than playing a console on a CRT. It's pixel and not scan-line addressed.

This is one game where the raw blown-up integer scaled shader free version is the most accurate.

>>12110039
Well now I'm gonna have to check it on my CRT and compare because I don't believe that is what the game looked like for those who played it back in the day.

>>12109805
I get it. The original definitely has a lot of charm and I've been a fan of how it uses color since I first saw screenshots of it. As well, the extra charm of how technically impressive it is for its time. I've always found games that push its native platform to its limits to be really cool by those merits alone.

Pioneer is a step up from programmer's art, but I do hear where you're coming from about FOSS games having a certain "look". I do think it does well with what it does, though I wish its towns and scenery had more details.

>>12110089
ChatGPT wouldn't put a period outside quotation marks. nta btw

>>12110076
Nobody played Frontier on a CRT, you played it on your computer's monitor, which was VGA is you were on DOS, or equivalent for other platforms.

>>12110118
VGA is a signal standard, not a display. VGA monitors were CRTs. Are you ok, anon?

>>12110124
You know what I mean, don't be a fag

>>12110039
>blown-up integer scaled shader
mode 13h isn't integer. Pixels are slightly taller. It's better to let dosbox do the scaling.

>>12110118
Like 90% of Amiga users just used some banged up TV

>>12109907
>even though it's literally improved in every single way.
Except that it removed the ability to see pirates on the map which erases like one third of the actual gameplay. And what even are some of those new "ships" or those vomit backgrounds. I heard you love 5 dollar FMV's starring the programmers cousin.

>>12110332
Every Amiga user I knew had C= 1082 monitors, but I'm in the US, maybe in the UK people only had TVs

>>12110346
>Except that it removed the ability to see pirates on the map which erases like one third of the actual gameplay.
And non-pirates too, like how do you intercept a trader mid-flight if you can't see them.

>>12109938
did you just get filtered by pixels on /vr/

>>12110346
Can't you infer this from the population level, route, and type of law or lack thereof?

>>12110385
>Infer the trajectory of an individual ship from population level
It doesn't sound like you know what we're talking about

>>12100681
GLFrontier is saying it needs some file called 'fe2.s'?

>>12110494
Yeah you can get that file by installing Frontier. Just launch dosbox and install it in some mount somewhere and find and copy the file to the proper place which will depend on your OS I think. Should be in the readme.

https://github.com/BrettWilsonDev/glfrontier-extended.git

This appears to be more up to date. Has cheats, more modern build system. Etc.

>>12110176
I can only guess that you mean CRT TVs as opposed to CRT monitors, both of which are CRTs, so congratulations you're still retarded.
>>12110378
Yeah because I actually played these games as a kid and today with a CRT so I know what they're supposed to look like. Only ignorant zoomers and pixelart brainrot victims think that screenshot looks good.

>>12110690
I don't know what he's hallucinating either but I know I could clearly see the pixels on the Philips RGB monitor while I played the game on Amiga, it just didn't bother me because higher res 3D games weren't really a thing so I didn't know it was something to be bothered by, or the low frame rate for that matter.
Does it look good? Maybe not. Does it still look better than FFE, Pioneer and Freelancer? Infinitely.
Yes, my opinions are objectively true and correct and if you disagree, you are wrong.

>>12107754
>>12107761
I remember there were some planets you couldn't land without autopilot because something was bugged about their frame of reference, or something, though.
Also my frontier save was ruined by some bug where I couldn't get rid of a passenger after exceeding the time limit.
Does glfrontier fix these kind of things? It was very fun while it lasted.

Interesting thread. I’ve never played or even heard of any of these. Where should I start?

>>12111070
Want arcade ww2 fighters in space gameplay? Elite 1. Want a real newtonian space sim? Skip Frontier and just play Pioneer.

>>12111109
Oolite is to Elite 1 what Pioneer is to Frontier.

>>12096626 (OP)
Braben is the most underrated dev in the history of gaming. He's a fucking genius that makes carmack look like a moist napkin. He's to space sims what Werner von Braun is to rockets.

>>12111785
This was true until Elite Dangerous.

>>12111790
Is it really that bad? I haven't played it

>>12110494
It needs the original game in the same folder.

>>12110332
Amiga couldn't be connected to a TV out of the box. It required a TV-modulator, sold separately. You could barely read the system font on it.
Most Amiga kids hat 1084s, NEC or Philips RGB monitors.

>>12111798
No

>>12111798
Yes

>>12111798
Maybe

Elite 3 is stunningly beautiful but the UI is such godawful unusable garbage compared to 2.

>>12111798
It's Elite on steroids.
But it has probably peaked when it comes to new technologies. Habitable planets with biospheres at least as diverse as No Man's Sky are probably beyond their scope, and considering Elite Dangerous is very hard scifi, they would have to do a lot more than scattering some cartoon animals and plants to fit their graphical fidelity.

>>12111790
Braben left the project when they started to charge users over and over for each update.

>>12112152
That picture makes me uncomfortable

Post some sweet Elite POKEs

>>12110527
how has this not been mentioned in the various wikis and resources on frontier and elite? great find anon

>>12113193
People still haven't updated anything about the original glfrontier website being taken down.

>>12111798
It's decent, you're just talking to an attention-starved contrarian.

>>12113401
Elite Dangerous sucks, anon. And it's not retro.

>>12113446
NTA, c >>12112149

>>12113401
Judging by the player count, saying it's good is the contrarian take.

>>12113193
Why play glfrontier over ffed3d? Genuinely asking.

>>12114154
Not an argument, game already peaked years ago in terms of active players per day.

>>12114254
No Windows.

>>12114279
It is an argument because you were arguing mine was the contrarian (unpopular) take. You didn't argue the merits of the game, just the popularity of the argument. Mine is the popular opinion.

>he thinks "ED sucks" is the contrarian take in an Elite 1/Frontier thread
lol
lmao even

>>12100725
I don't know how to tell you this, but actual planes in the 80's and 90's often had low res cockpit displays despite some pretty high-res stuff outside the front windows too

>>12114309
in an Elite 1/Frontier thread on a retro games board, even

>>12114309
It isn't contrarian even in the ED community. It's quite the game.

>>12114290
Contrarian and unpopular aren't the same thing. Where is this misconception coming from? Reddit?
A contrarian is basically a troll who adopts extremely weird positions just for the sake of riling up people.
It's different from someone whose opinion is different from what's popular because he's more knowledgeable on the topic than the average casualfag who barely even understands how to play a real space sim.

>>12114392
Judging by the responses, you're the contrarian here.

>>12114398
Either this definition is wrong, or there is nothing wrong in being a "contrarian".

>>12114290
It's not retro, stop trying to market Steam games here.

It also sucks compared to even Frontier, for reasons already listed above. Braben left because the project was turning into a grift as well.

This is a retro thread about retro Elite games. Not a platform to shill Dangerous, which already peaked in terms of raw number of active players, and active player hours per month. People are tired of it already.

>>12114438
I said it sucks. How is that shilling it? Did you mean to reply to the other guy?

>>12114440
Yeah, oops. My mistake.

I'm just gonna build glfrontier-extended and report back in a bit.

How are you supposed to get started in Frontier? I keep dying on the first engagement because both missiles miss and the laser is absolutely useless. Can I just run away?

>>12114461
Set the flight mode to engines off and use your thrusters (shift and enter) to regulate your speed relative to the enemy. Get close slowly enough that you can just laser it to death. Missiles work better too if there's not too much velocity between you and the target.
It's only a bit tricky in this game because it doesn't actually show your Rvel to the target, so you have to watch the distance closely and make sure it doesn't change too fast.

>>12114485
And by close I mean around 2-3 km. You should keep the velocity low so that the enemy doesn't just zip past. You need to use engines off for this because "manual control" chooses the nearest planet as "zero velocity" which is totally useless in combat.

>>12114503
And on regulating speed, if you're new just focus on killing the velocity entirely first. Ignore the speedometer in the corner, it's useless and only tells your speed relative to the nearest planetary body or star. Watch the number next to the enemy after you've targeted it. Is the number growing? He's moving away from you, so press enter to nudge yourself forward. If the number is getting smaller that means he's moving toward you. Use shift to brake. Once the number is neither growing nor shrinking you can start *carefully* using enter to edge closer.
If you're worried about the enemy hitting you ,you can rotate your ship slightly in different directions while thrusting to give yourself sideways momentum, but it's not always necessary as the enemies are bad shots.

>>12114461
I would immediately get to Sol and start doing cargo runs in-system. It's safe and there are some easy cargo runs which are profitable. Once you get some cash get a better ship and some shields. If this is the first time you played, I would stick to cargo running and avoid combat until you can get a beefier ship.

>>12114557
That's how you get people who grind until they have a panther clipper so they can just autopilot-ram enemies to death thinking they're so clever and they move on to program modern "clones" of the game where the combat works completely wrong because they never bothered to learn how to play.
Any combat can be beaten with the basic ship.

>>12111798
I like Elite Dangerous as something to relax with. I use my old VR headset to just whizz around doing odd-jobs. With a HOTAS joystick and a HCS Voice Pack for voice commands it's very calming.

>>12114582
If you're a rank newb who barely knows how to fly it will be frustrating until you get a ship which allows some combat. Besides, the Panther is for ransoming places and not really for fun flying. I like to set her down on manual though, on planets.

The game is a full open world playground where you just do what you like. But getting some money is part of the key to that too. If the poor anon is just getting frustrated with your advice of 'just become Elite during your first hour of play' it might be useful to give other advice too. Combat is merely one element of the game and it's not even a necessary one.

Behead the apostates who play space sims to "chill" and "do what they like".
Kill all those who play Freelancer.

>>12109327
Depends on the ship.

>>12114635
What's wrong with that?

>>12115516
I presume they're having fun wrong.

>>12114404
The way people use contrarian as a derogetory term implies the person opposing the popular opinion doesn't sincerely believe in their stance. Nothing to do with finances or the stock market.

Playing Frontier:
First I get taken out of autopilot time dilation with a terrifying message "fuel tank empty". I've done this same route several times. No idea what to do so I just turn time dilation back on and autopilot takes me to destination without any issues.
And then I got stuck in a dock. I ask for a launch request, the ship moves out of the bay into an airlock, the door opens, the F7 icon turns on for an instant (too fast to click on) and turns off again, the door immediately closes again and I'm taken back into the bay and charged another $3.
This game is a buggy mess.

>>12115975
Which version is this? Never happened to me, though nobody's gonna deny Frontier is buggy. FFE was even worse before fans patched it.
Speaking of time acceleration and bugs, not many know the pirates are actually supposed to attack you in wings. But it only happens if you never touch the fastest time setting. If you want to experience the "hard" mode where you fight multiple enemies at the same you have to travel at the second fastest time acceleration only. The highest setting breaks these formations for some reason.
In FFE they took a sledge hammer to it and fixed the bug just by making the pirates spawn next to you when the game decides you've triggered a JRPG random encounter. You can no longer watch them fly in the system map or try maneuvers to throw them off your tail.
Soulless.

>>12115975
Anyway, in case you didn't know, if you ever actually run out of fuel you can refuel in-flight if you have hydrogen fuel in your cargo. You just go to the cargo screen and click refuel.

>>12115751
Well finance is a good example since most people have no idea how it works lmao. Being informed is unpopular in a lot of cases.

>>12103763
Atari ST usually runs these types of games with a better frame rate than Amiga, cool looking game.

>>12116969
Starglider 2 has amazing sounds on Amiga, you wouldn't want to miss on that.

>>12116969
The WHDload install of Starglider 2 makes good use of turbocards. Even on a 020 the game is buttery smooth, real or emulated.
There could be similar peformance gains on an Atari Falcon, but I'm not familiar with that hardware.

>>12104052
Just like Summertime Saga

>>12114254
mostly because I like the look and feel of Frontier over FFE, like the UI, and the flat colors over the texture mapped stuff, plus FFED3DAJ just looks too "modern"

>>12111934
>TV-modulator, sold separately
Pretty sure they were included in the box, at least in the UK

>>12111934
The adaptor came in the box for the 500 (I have one boxed with it), possibly not for later models agree that most people used RGBs though

i didnt play much Elite as it was over my 11yo head, but i liked this
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VVLX62-l55c

>>12117132
Oh cool, I think they have cheaper basic accelerators now as well like that rpi one? I need an Amiga in my life.

I thought someone in this thread recommended Star Fleet II but I guess not, so I imagine I got it from a reddit thread found while googling for one of the games mentioned here.
Anyway, I'm enjoying it so far. The interface in the pic is what you're looking at 90% of the time. I haven't gotten to any combat missions yet, but flying around and sending landing parties has been fun so far.
I did manage to convince an enemy ship which was sending SOS messages to surrender, and sent a boarding party to commandeer the vessel. The side view for "internal security" is more elaborate than I was expected, though I don't know how well it works in an actual combat situation.
I have one or two missions to go before I get a promotion and start getting contact information, will come back here and continue my blog once i do so.

>>12117828
Landing view pic. Not my screenshot, since I haven't gotten far enough for a boarding combat situation

>>12117830
Here's a table of the missions for each rank. There's planetary invasions and stuff which I'm looking forward to.

>>12111798
It's a testament to mediocrity.

I mean it has its moments. The "feel" of traveling through space is pretty nice, there's some interesting scenery, and actually the combat is reasonably decent for this genre. And doing the land buggy missions with friends in VR looked GREAT, back when the VR gimmick was worth spending a weekend on. But the kind of massive "living universe" game it wants to be can't survive on just those. The much-touted "background simulation" it is built on is super lame and wouldn't even be worthy of the kind of late 90s BBS door games it's based on. The procedural content club was wielded too heavily with the belief it would be an easy solution to all problems of fleshing out the galaxy, and in reality everything is just boringly samey and distributed. Not to mention ship balance issues strongly obviate what would otherwise be the most "fun" ships aesthetically in favor of meta- the feel of being a "space trucker" in a Type-7 is great, but why bother when you can just fly that fat piece of shit Anaconda which not only carries far more but can jump much further? etc.
It's the kind of game you play and everything seems really cool for a short while and then you inevitably find yourself letting out long slow exhales and wondering why you bother.

I did love my feddy 'vette tho

>>12118271
>The "feel" of traveling through space is pretty nice
It's not even that, if you've actually played the previous games in the series. A speed cap in normal space and a "warp drive" that puts you in a separate hyperspace instance and automatically slows you down when you get near a planet. Hugbox bullshit for toddlers.
It's just extremely disappointing all around.
This series went from a top 10 GOAT space game in 1993 to a 6/10 at best.

Anyone play Gateway? It's very different (it's a text adventure with pictures as you can see) but it's the kind of storyline I'd love to have in a space sim.

>>12118819
Great game, but yeah different genre. Though the setting and structure with the missions could definitely have worked with a space sim. Gateway 2: Homeworld was good too. I haven't read the books though.

>>12118819
Does this even run on modern OSes?

>>12118819
Is it any good or just someone's sophomore effort?

>>12121056
There's still no ScummVM support for any of Legend's games for some reason. But it works fine with DOSBox.

>>12121079
But that's a good thing. ScummVM is cancer.

>>12121102
Hey, let's not go overboard, it's not like it's Retroarch

>>12121056
Why would you care?
>>12121064
It's probably the best and most polished text adventure I've played, made at a time when the genre was well past reaching maturity.

>>12121102
I like it for some games, like the ones where you can turn on subtitles and voices at the same time where you couldn't do that in the original. For Legend games ScummVM isn's really necessary though. You can even play them with MT32 sound in DOSBox.

>>12121109
>It's probably the best and most polished text adventure I've played, made at a time when the genre was well past reaching maturity.
That's quite the endorsement. I'll check it out.

>>12117828
Starfleet is cool, but if we're on the topic of autistic off-brand Star Trek simulators, I enjoyed Rules of Engagement 2 more. This developer had a gimmick going on where they had two series of games, RoE, and Breach interacting. So if you started a boarding action in RoE you could go to Breach and play it out with Laser Squad type tactics game mechanics. Sadly, the Breach games were pretty mediocre at best and IMO RoE is better played on its own.

>>12121169
>So if you started a boarding action in RoE you could go to Breach and play it out with Laser Squad type tactics game mechanics.
That's really awesome. I've always had some kind of dream of an Elite type game as the overworld for an X-Com type squad fighter. Probably hard to make a really good game that works well across scales like that.

252 posts
Nobody mentions ORIGIN's Space Rogue
Shame on you
You all failed the test

>>12122972
I've played it, it was okay. Felt like a bit of a letdown vs what I imagined from seeing that ad though.

>>12115975
Read the manual first next time fucking zoomer mongoloid

>>12117828
I remember playing this way back. Although it looks like a glorified spreadsheet these days, as a kid with imagination to spare this was an exciting simulation of what a starship could be like.

>>12123092
Why, does it list all the bugs?

>>12096626 (OP)
There's something gorgeous and timeless about Frontier's polygonal graphics.

>>12122972
You're not an authority on the subject, calm down

>>12122972
I've been waiting for someone to bring it up, because 99% it's usually me who has to, along with a handful of other space sim essentials that still haven't been mentioned. You're not the only one running tests.
Though usually people talk about the Ultima-style walking-out-of-your-ship aspect, Space Rogue is noteworthy for being one of the first attempts to bring Newtonian physics to a 3D space flight game. They aren't kidding about "authentic flight dynamics", not entirely anyway.
>>12123260
No, he ain't, but I am.

>>12123312
>along with a handful of other space sim essentials that still haven't been mentioned
so post em nigga, I just want to play some nice games not have a cock measuring contest of who knows the most obscure space shit

>>12123723
Warhead, I-War, Orbiter (2001) and Microsoft Space Simulator are not obscure at all but you need to have a damn good story to explain, cadet, why you haven't mentioned them when the thread is nearing 300 replies.
Besides these just how many Newtonian retro space sims can you name that aren't Frontier?

>>12121109
>Why would you care?
Because I want to play it without DOSbox.

>>12121169
Ok yeah, I think I ended up with Starfleet 2 while googling how to play Rules of Engagement 2. The shield display in your screenshot hits some Space Trader (PalmOS) neurons in my brain which is the game that brought me to this whole genre in the first place. I am definitely going to play this.
Are there any other games with systems that worked together like that? The closest I can think of is games like Wizardry where you re-use the same file, or Sim City/Streets of Sim City/Sim Copter/etc.

>>12123898
The whole world has forgotten the missing link between Elite and Elite: Frontier
F.o.f.t. was very ambitious but also very buggy

>>12122972
I like its spiritual successor more

>>12123898
>>12124773
get a room you two jeez

>>12123183
I like how the clocks in the towns show the system time.