Date   : Wed, 09 Aug 2000 16:23:19 -0700 (PDT)
From   : Angus Duggan <angus@...>
Subject: Elite versions

Mark de Weger writes:
>Mark's discovered his joystick...
>
>There's a number of versions of Elite going around. Some versions, among
>which the original (at least presented as such on Ian Bell's web site) have
>two strange bugs (features?).
>
>- If you press F0 to launch, the game sometimes flashes briefly "bad
>command" and refuses to launch. Repeatedly pressing F0 solves the problem.

This sometimes happens if you have saved or loaded a commander immediately
before launching. What is happening is that the disc is still spinning, which
the disc system uses as a signal that it can use the catalogue cached at
E00-FFF. Elite overwrites these locations immediately after loading a
commander, so the catalogue is corrupt and the disc system gets confused.
Waiting for the disc to stop spinning fixes the problem. I'm not sure if this
is the same problem in the emulator versions, if so, you should congratulate
the emulator authors for a very true to life implementation of the Beeb
hardware :-)

>- The joystick doesn't work.
>
>I've only checked this on emulators, but BeebEm and PCBBC are consistent
>(and at least BeebEm supports joysticks).

You have toggled the joystick support, I assume (caps-lock, 'J', caps-lock)?
The way that Elite scans the keyboard is somewhat tricky too, there is no
de-bounce on the in-flight scanning routines, so the game pause doesn't
always pause properly. I think you should hear a beep when the pause is done
properly.

Also, note that Elite-A removed BitStik support in favour of Delta 14B
support (because one of my brothers complained that it was too hard to fly by
keyboard, and wanted to use his 14B! *Real* commanders use the force and the
keyboard :-).

a.
--
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