It took about 5 minutes, not 20 minutes to load Elite on the Speccy! At 1500 baud (average) the Spectrum would fill memory in 320 seconds (just over 5 minutes) so no game could have ever taken 20 minutes to load. Most games had flash loaders too with a higher bit rate. Also the BBC Micro didn't come with a disc drive, it was an add-on extra. You could get disc drives for the Spectrum too, such as the Opus Discovery (Opus a major maker of BBC Micro disc drives too). A BBC Micro with a disc drive would have cost over £500. On a real BBC Micro, there is very little flicker - I think the flicker you saw is an artefact of the emulation.
74HC138 There is always much exaggeration on Speccy loading times even 128k games were not much more than 6 to 7 mins ..Mastertronic/Ocean/Imagine/Domark to name but a few were using hyperload coding which reduced tape loading a lot. you hear "half hour to load" from folk that never actually owned a computer back in the day it's anther Mythical fact that those that were not part of the scene like to add to just "fit in". I'm proud to have at least been part of it even to the point of typing in code from BIG K magazine .. corrected errors and got a game running ..saved to tape both on a Vic 20 and a Spectrum. The retroscene is starting to come across as a polished format now as facts and myths are slowly but surely being separated from each other this is very important if we want future generations to have a true representation of how things really were back in our/my day (assuming we're all at least in our 40's lol)
+74HC138 sorry for the late reply, but I'm guessing the flicker is a side effect of TH-cam rendering the footage as 30fps vs the BBC's native 50hz. Because of that, images stay on the screen longer (or might be missed entirely) so flicker that may have been barely noticeable in the game really stands out. TH-cam can show 50/60fps videos now, but they only added that pretty recently and you'd have to be capturing it at that rate to begin with for it to display right.
As someone who's owned a Speccy for thirty two years, I think the "twenty minute to load" complaints were probably confabulated memories of playing games like The Bard's Tale, where you had to load separate areas from multiple tapes.
I had one of those weird little microdrive infinite tape systems, it was very fast but super unreliable unfortunately so half the time I'd find it wouldn't load and I'd have to hook up the cassette recorder anyway.
I played both versions a lot - BBC at school after hours, and Speccy version at home (damn Lenslok!). Two fun facts with the Speccy version: 1. It didn't care about your rotation when docking. As long as you lined up with the middle, you could be sideways and everything was fine. 2. It has this amazing exploit. Launch from a station, stop, turn around, enable hyperspace, and while it's counting down, dock again (remember - rotation doesn't matter!). The hyperspace countdown will end during the docking anim, and now the game says you are (a) in the new system and (b) docked. Much easier than all that faffing with a jump drive! So you could make a trade every 30 seconds or so and make masses of money very quickly!
It's probably already been mentioned here. But the faster framerate on the Beeb is largely due to a clever programming trick. It drew 'half' of the lines for the ship/s on one frame, and the other half on the next! The result is a more flickery but higher framerate. The Speccy developers only had screenshots to work from and were given none of the hacks/optimisations that the Beeb devs learned. I think they did a grand job nonetheless! I grew up with the Beeb, but I give this competition to the Spectrum! The Beeb tape version has zero missions, and only a fraction of the ships/equipment that the Spectrum has. A tape to tape comparison is fairer after all.
The BBC version displays your total updated credits when you destroy another ship, not just the credits the kill has earned you. This confused me too when I played the emulated game a few years ago - the credits didn't add up - so I looked at the manual on Ian Bell's website and got the answer.
Sorry, did I hear you right? 20 minutes to load a spectrum game...?! Not on any spectrum I had! From memory, I never had a game that took longer than 5/6 minutes, max! Elite. One of them. Interesting comparison, but I'm not sure I can trust what's being said.
@@bigdaz7272 the baud rate of the speccy tape was much higher than the c64 one of many things that was superior on the speccy. Thus 20 minutes is just ignorance or a lie.
yeah, even the slowest non turbo loaders on the spectrum 48 the longest load time was never more than 5 mins, including a loading screen. A 128k game could theoretically be just over 2 and a half times that, with Starglider, Where time stood still and Carrier command all coming in at around 10-11 mins.
A very enjoyable review Drew! There are so many subtle and not so subtle differences between all of the different versions of Elite. I hope you have the time to pair off another two versions of sometime :-)
Oh, I see a dirty but interesting hack BBC version used to escalate framerate. They do not draw objects completely, before the frame is shown. Each frame they draw only a fraction on the object wireframe vectors they have. The upcoming vectors are drawn on the next frame. Rarely we see most of the lines on the screen at the same time. On the other hand, ZX version had to draw every frame completely before it was shown on the screen. Additionally is plays sounds using CPU power only, no BBC-like sound procedures offload. So technically ZX version is more "honest", but BBC is more cunning)
+Анна Макарова Fully agree, on bbc you clearly see the flickering in wire frame gfx. zx does not have this defect. this imply a kind of back buffer and the need to bitblt the entire backbuffer in Video RAM. of course this have a negative impact on FPS on machines without gfx acceleration or DMA. It's not a fair comparison due to differences
That was fascinating! Declaration of interest: I have a BBC (Model B+) and enjoy Elite on that (though I'm not much good at it!) but I've never played Spectrum Elite. Anyway, this seemed like a pretty fair review, though using emulated versions does rob the Beeb of one major advantage: it had a far better keyboard than the Spectrum, which made a big difference in this game given the large number of keys in play.
Actually, the keyboard of the 48kB rubber keyed Spectrum is a bliss when playing things like Elite. The keyboard overlay was something normal keyboards could not handle, and handy it was/is! I had all the keys I needed in my left hand (accelerating with space and breaking with symbol shift under my thumb) plus one finger always hovering over the E button to counter incoming missiles, another one over the W (energy bomb IIRC) and the little finger operated the mighty guns on the A key! Thus the escape capsule on W was also always at the ready. To the right there was a Quickshot II joystick firmly sucked onto the table's smooth surface for maneuvering. That setup served me through all the ranks up to ELITE, finally.
@@seraphinberktold7087 Ah well, probably things are a bit different at your exalted level! I was never nearly that good. I found (and still do) the Beeb one easier, but maybe if I'd ever got anywhere near Elite level things might have been different.
It's 2017 and I'm still amazed, how good Elite Dangerous looks. I still wonder what would've happened if you'd shown E:D alongside Elite in 1984. How many heads would explode... :D
Played Elite on spectrum 128k using disks. It was awesome. Used the insta-jump exploit a lot, but my save got destroyed with the "supernova" mission, because when i exited the station i got killed all the time. Got to "Dangerous" though. Ah the days! Thanks for comparison, Drew!
Elite on the Speccy could have run faster, there are other games that do it. Starion, for example. It was 1985, most programmers still couldn't take the most out of the machine. And I bet the ones that could were secretive about their tricks. I think an Elite reprogrammed by a good 3D wiz could run as well as the BBC version.
That little 48k gave me more years of pleasure than any top end PC does now. I think I spent 5 years playing Sir Fred and got to about level 7, my bro couldnt get past level 2, hard but so addictive.
Feels like a shame to quibble about frame rate, when these were 8-bit processors. Just managing 3D at all, was a massive achievement. I do recall some 128K games taking 15 minutes to load, but those used the full 128K of memory.
Don't know if anyone had pointed it out yet, but the additional dodecahedron stations, as well as the landing view were new additions with the floppy disc version, they weren't on the tape version. As someone who grew up playing this on the BBC B though, I always thought the speccy version looked terrible :)
Thanks! Loved watching this. I spent soooo much time on the Spectrum version in the 80's. Always remember holding that little plastic decoder up to the screen and trying to decipher what the heck it said!! :D And now, 35 years later, I'm playing ELite Dangerous.
About the other versions... When I was a kid, I was both luck and unlucky because I had a PC/XT compatible... Loved it, but in Hungary it was somewhat hard to get games for it. But I remember playing at least 2 different versions of Elite for DOS... If I remember well, they were a bit faster, and the later version (Elite Plus) was prettier too.
Framerate on the ZX gets exponentially worse as more points need to be plotted per second. Also you should be comparing whatever was the latest update to Elite on the Acorn machines at the time of the Firebird licensed conversions to ZX/CPC/C64 etc rather than the original release (if that is what you are comparing). Possibly the Master 128 version is the best on Acorn.
The Z80's 16 bit maths calculations in the spectrum were WAY faster than the beebs 6502 based cpu which is why the spectrum game wasn't a flickering mess when it calculated those 3D shapes. I think the flickering was an attempt by the coders to take some pressure off the poor beebs cpu and help prevent it from chugging even more than it was by doing less draw calls. No idea where you get the idea that the beebs cpu was "a lot more efficient"
Jooeffoh no the flickering was because the BBC didn't have enough memory to double buffer the display, so if the drawing took longer than the vertical retrace you'd get flicker. The spectrum and CPC had enough memory to draw the next frame off screen and just tell the video chip to display that offscreen buffer next refresh.
Not really, because you could display the other buffer without having to copy it by pointing the CRTC at the new start of screen address. A standard BBC can do this with the 10K modes but for a 20K mode you'd need to use shadow RAM which was only available on later models such as the BBC Master.
How does having an extra buffer help if the CPU cannot supply the calculations fast enough (as is evident by the fact it cannot supply a consistent FPS) doing so would cause extra overhead for the memory bandwidth thus creating a slow down overall. Unless my memory is failing me on this, the Beeb (without tube Coprocessor) is a CPU driven system without chips taking the workload off the CPU.
Having the screen double buffered would not have made it slower, just flicker free. It of course would not make things faster, but switching between the two display regions would be instant - no need to block copy an off screen region into screen RAM - something which I believe the Z80 on the Speccy was quite good at. On the BBC B (and later related models) there is no contention between the CPU and the CRTC for accessing the RAM - the RAM is clocked at 4MHz and the 2MHz CPU and CRTC access the RAM on opposing cycles. The Electron (and Archimedes) is different though and it does suffer from contention.
Good comparison here Drew. I write this as ELITE has just turned up on Royal Mail stamps (although the ELITE one is 2nd class postage). I remember playing this on BBC at a mate's house and waiting sooo long for it to come out on the ZX Spectrum. On the BBC we played for hours shooting the vipers as they exited the space station and holding down the hyperspace key (to pause the countdown) until just before the last little bit of shield was wiped out and then jumping to the next system. The Speccy version had little of this and I remember the gameplay being more toned down and less exciting. Here are my thoughts on the ZX Spectum version... Load screen was very poor. ZX Spectrum embellishments didn't add anything to the pace of the BBC game Hyperspace jump sound was disappointingly short and I still don't know what it was meant to be. There were never any explosions, or explosion debris, dust etc, just a red circle. Why? Sound effects were very poor and nothing like up to the BBC standard No Dodo space stations..what? I'm pretty sure that no company of Vipers rained havoc on you if you shot at the space station. So yes. I totally agree with your verdict. I played both for hours and am - - - - ELITE - - - - on both platforms. Both very good. BBC B version (particularly disc version) is and was always king. Thanks so much!
The Speccy version's space station police definitely would blast you if you attacked the station, or started trouble with other ships nearby the station.
i do not know the BBC version,but the gameplay in Spectrum version allowed direct hyperspace- docking jump by doing a normal docking and activating hyperspace jump
Used to love playing this as a kid, I did download it a few months back using an emulator. While the graphics now look dated but amazing the gameplay is still superb
It seems to be an easy (lazy) conversion. Vectors can be really fast on ZX, see Star Wars game or scene productions. Each of the counters could be in a different colour, not all white on red. It's the same use of RAM and CPU.
The BBC version had a fully working docking computer- you could sit back and watch it line up with the space station, match rotation and land. The Spectrum version didn't do any of that, it just said, 'Oh, you've landed!'. The Spectrum version had several bugs including: occasional zero altitude space stations- you could get really close to them but if you tried to land in one you hit the planet surface; infinite altitude space stations- as you approached the planet the director said the space station was behind you. If you turned round and followed the director it eventually just disappeared; missiles that flew the same speed as the object they were targetted on to- the two objects just wandered around on the scanner until you landed. I'm one of those sad individuals that got to Elite status the hard way- on the Beeb! Does anyone remember the missions you got sent on?
nice wee return to my childhood there Drew, cheers! My dad had a BBC Micro B. No idea how he managed to afford it as we connected it to one of the roundest 13" TVs I remember ever seeing :D
However there was no way we could afford £300 compared to £100 for a computer and don't forget you wiggled the ram pack after 11 months,crashed the speccy ,took it back to the shop and got a brand new one with another years guarantee. Elite was so amazing on either of these machines though along with almost anything by Beyond
Really nice review and very interesting to see the original Elites gameplay because I never had this game myself. Even though I had the Spectrum I missed Elite through going off to Poly just around the time it came out. But its funny how you still get excited watching gameplay like that - you can see why these sorts of games blew people away back then.
Errr. How many people had disc drives with the BBC for home, actually how many people had the BBC at home period, let alone a disk drive. As for the Spectrum loading time you say you are comparing 32K BBC vs 48K Spectrum, then load the 128K Spectrum version? Loading this from Microdrive would trounce the BBC. As for graphics this was poorly coded on the Spectrum..
Speccy version probably got slowed down a bit, because of it's crazy screen map layout, optimised for aligned character printing which could then just INC H register (add 256 to the pointer address) to move down to the next line on the screen but only for (aligned) 8 lines. That's why loading its screens load funny in bits, as the screen lines aren't consecutive in memory. Makes line drawing routines a real pain! BBC screen memory was nice and easy to deal with, and a 6502 at 2MHZ is a fair match for a 3.5MHZ z80, and lines etc. would have been much easier to draw.!
People get confused about the loading times of the spectrum cause they were thinking that a game was on a 30 min per side tape, while mosy games were recorded on short tapes. In fact i had many 60 min tapes with more than 7-10 games per side. If the 20 min load time myth was true , we would only be able to pirate only 1 game per side. So people get your facts right. You can say that maybe with bad tapes and recorder it could lead to faulty loads ,and spend half an hour trying to load. C64 on the other hand was very slow at loading
Yep 6502 was more efficient as per instruction but was heavily register starved hence why it was the cheap cpu option. Great compare thanks, its close but seems too be more in the spectrum version game wise
billy blogs I found coding for the 6502 meant thinking carefully about how to use the registers, and one could get a speed boost from using page 0 locations for game variables.
Great video this for me as Elite was my favourite game - which I played firstly on a BBC (which my Dad borrowed from work) and then later on a Spectrum which was my first computer. The BBC version really got the adrenalin going whereas the Spectrum version was more pretty and atmospheric.
No way it had that low a framerate, not even close. I had a 128k +2, the one with the built in tape deck, would that matter? I'm 45 now and was 9 at the time so who knows haha. I also don't remember it having those exact sound effects, it's very strange. Another thing: I only played to Dangerous but I never saw a single mission offered to me. It wasn't until Elite Dangerous launched and I started looking into things that I realised missions were supposed to be part of the game.
Thanks for a trip down memory lane.. Never really compared the various ports, but I do wonder if coders who wrote the Speccy version (and other platform ports) had any access to the full original sources. It's not the kind of game that too many people could have written way back in 1985, let alone today.
Would have been nice to see a C64 comparison also. The display area on the C64 had more colours and was probably clearer than the BBC's (though the dual colour display on the Spectrum looks really good). I would have thought the C64 could have handled the planet rotation graphics (which look great imo). I'm also surprised the C64 didn't have the better sound of the BBC version with it's SID chip. I think the C64 version is basically the same as the BBC'c being made by the same programmers as the BBC original but not as optimised for the machine. I think I like the Spectrum's display more but other than that I think the Spectrum's programmer mimicked the C64 version.
Good comparison. I got to Elite on the 48k version, although i assume you got there a lot quicker on the beeb as your rewards were notably higher enabling you to upgrade quicker, alongside the higher framerate. All in all it was a thoroughly immersive game and you got used to the frame rate. It would be good to see the ending on different machines.
I was a Spectrum owner too, but I didn't get to play Elite until I got it on the Atari ST in 1992. That version was fantastic though with great sound and full colour graphics. I bought a copy of the Spectrum Elite on eBay some years later but at that point it just didn't compare. Starion was a much better game on the Speccy. Smoother and much more exciting.
The Spectrum 128k version of Elite would win hands down, as would most 128 versions of all Speccy games it's a shame that people tend to stay stuck in the 48k era which died in 1985
Comparing apples and pears here I think, a fairer comparison would be the enhanced BBC version vs the Spectrum as isn’t this using the later Soectrums full 128k RAM compared to the 32K BBC version shown here? The enhanced (or second processor ) version was imo the best of the lot, much more faithful to the original without the limitations of the BBC’B. Back in the day, I owned this on the Spectrum, Electron, BBC (and about 10 years later I got a 6502 second processor from a boot sale!) ST, PC and Archimedes. For me, the best of them all was the 2nd processor version, which I still play to this day on an emulator which incidentally flickers which the original hardware didn’t. Out of all the machines I list above, I regret selling the BBC’B the most.
I don't think it's fair to compare loading times when the equivalent Beeb didn't have a disk drive. Apart from that, it seems that the Beeb version keeps loading things in from disk during play, whereas the Speccy version, once loaded, didn't require further loading. Perhaps the Beeb flickering wasn't an issue on a CRT (I have a vague uneducated thought about some sort of scanline sync) but the extra speed probably made for more fun battles. ~£335 (Beeb in 1983) is ~£1000 in today's money ~£130 (Speccy in 1983) is ~£400 in today's money Not really comparable, is it? But it's remarkable to see what you could get out of a Speccy, considering the price difference between it and its closest rivals - Beeb, C64, Amstrad. The Speccy was a computer for the masses and (as far as I'm aware) Speccy sales trounced those of any other computer at the time in the UK - moreso when you only count what matters - sales to individuals rather than to schools. It was seemingly the C64 in the USA, but then it seems to be the Mac there now, which is nice, but hugely expensive compared to a PC. They must have more spending power (or access to credit) than we do...
The Acorn BBC B (32K) was £399. Early adopters got it for £350, but the price soon rose and stayed there. Did it fall in price when Acorn was trying to recover from a glut of Electrons? I remember the Electron falling in price. The disc drive was another £400. The Beeb needed fast storage though, as it only had 32K RAM. Much of that RAM was used up if you used high resolution. It wasn't until 1984, that the B+ model was launched with more RAM, including 20K set aside for the display.
A tad late, but if the Bounty system on the BBC micro was anything like the Commodore 64 then what you see on your flight-screen is not the bounty, but your total sum of credits. so for the first ship the bounty is not 90 credits bounty, but rather 20 credits, just like the spectrum. Also for the lines (if anything like the C64 version) on the planets to be turned off, press pause, then press P. and the crater and rotating lines are turned off. There was a long range of settings that could be turned on and off during pause(frozen). Inverse controls, damp and so on. if they are also valid on the BBC I dont know, but i guess it would be similar key chart since as i understand it, that they both have function keys. Here is a link to the key chart for the c64 version. stiggyblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/dscf0009-1024x765.jpg
BBC model B at 399 did not include a disc drive and they were very expensive. The BBC version on cassette had less ships than the disc version which already had less ships than the Spectrum. BBC version did screen flicker quite badly but not as bad as the C64, the Spectrum version did redraw a bit slower but it was solid and while I noticed some graphics corruption on the video that didn't actually occur (Emulation/LCD screen problems??) BBC had nicer colours but text suffered with a lower resolution. Sound was far better on the BBC but if that's your thing the C64 was better still. Bought Elite on disc for the BBC before I even owned the computer. Bought a Spectrum so that I could play Elite on it. BTW Spectrum 128K version works fine on the 48K system and doesn't have the terrible Lenslok. Overall the Spectrum version was better but not by much. But Elite on the BBC was a monumental moment for me.
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Just nitpicking but baud isn't bits per second but signal state change per second. If your modulation has more than two possible states, then your bit rate will be higher than baud rate. It is possible to have 1200 baud modem with 1200 bps but many 1200 bps modems were 600 baud modems with phase shift keying delivering two bits per symbol.
Elite doesn’t take even nearly 20 minutes to load in the Spectrum 48k and that is almost identical. In hundreds of hours and only noticed one difference. A space station doesn’t launch vipers if you attack it in the 48k version. But let’s face it, you only ever do that once… just to see what happens (you die) 48k load I just timed it at 5 minutes 3 seconds. The pita was Lenslok at the end. I have had a spectrum since April 1983 ( not the same one, about 15 altogether now) The longest load time for any game I’ve seen on the 48k is Doomdarks Revenge which put up a loading screen, then over wrote quite a bit of it with the games starting conditions which were used once to start the game…. Then lost. If you wanted to restart..l you had to reload as the game didn’t store those starting conditions anywhere else.
The Spectrum version was often rated more highly than the BBC version and I've heard a few people say it was the best version, ahead of the BBC version.
You're comparing the apparent frame rates of the BBC vs the Spectrum versions of Elite but am I right that you're running them on emulators (PC based)? If so wouldn't that mean you're only really seeing the differences in how well the emulators are running the code? To get a true comparison you would need to get hold of the original hardware.
Emulators for both the BBC and Spectrum were approximately correct in speed. While some emulators for systems (including PC just check out DOSBox) will be completely at the whim of the system doing the emulation plus some timing alterations. Obviously for true comparison emulation is a bit off.
Enjoyed the video, From memory, the BBC did flicker a bit. Probably lack of double buffering, I read once that using a screen buffer could take up 20k of the BBC's 32k. Any chance of doing a comparison between the BBC and the Nintendo NES version?
I personally think the NES version is the best 8 bit version by a long way. I owned the bbc version back in the day and then later the Spectrum 128k both on real hardware. I have to say that like many things you always remember your 'first' with the greatest affection/rose tint. 😂
i just saw a video showing a NES port of Elite with an Ian bell quote "best version". Did you try the NES version Drew Wagar ? i wonder how it compares to the zx or bbc.
I played both versions. I think Speccy version had a tidy, uncluttered feel to it which made it feel more 'real' and atmospheric. Whereas as the BBC version, in terms of display, seemed a bit naff.
I like your review and I certainly like the fact that you were fair as to give the Beeb the prize on this. I am more of a Spectrum fan as well but I love the Beeb. As what it comes to Elite, the Beeb version really trounces those in nearly all other formats except for the Archimedes, imho. I also think loading times either from disc or tape shouldn't come into play here because the Beeb didn't come with a disc drive as well. It cost more than the machine itself to add a drive to it. There's a cassette version of BBC's Elite (released in 1984) and it probably took at least as long as on the Spectrum to get loaded in, if I'm not mistaken. The Beeb version actually makes use of a programming technique displaying two different graphics modes on screen simultaneously. The Spectrum has no real text mode and a higher resolution. It's probably just too many bytes to update at once with that Spectrum resolution and that "game window", and I mean even if the Spectrum had a 6502 CPU instead of the Z80A. Perhaps if the game-play area in the Speccy would be narrower or something, certainly there would be less bytes to move around and we there'd be a performance increase. Beeb's Elite is indeed a masterpiece. Sound effects, graphics, programming techniques... everything in it is very well thought of and well crafted. The Spectrum version is fun, I love it and never really had played the BBC version until some years ago but there's no question that the Beeb takes the cake here. Unfortunately I'm not as good an Elite player as I used to be (or any good at any other game for what it matters). Recently I had a crack at Elite on my Beeb and took nearly an hour to get the grips at docking the ship to the station. Simply couldn't recall how to get that right lol.
+Wilton Abreu Actually they DID use different modes on the Spectrum version of Elite for the screen. Only by Modes I mean different sections of the program. The top 2/3rd was updated by one part, while the bottom 1/3rd was done by another part. If they hadn't done it that way Elite would have been so slow it would be unplayable ;-)
What you might be willing to say is that the bottom part was updated only when there was a change, while the top section was updated every possible frame. That I agree. There's no different screen modes in the Spectrum, mate. It's all 256x192 pixels, the characters are drawn on screen as bitmaps exactly like anything else.
Your specs for the beeb graphics modes are wrong. 640 x 256, 2 colour. 320 x 256, 4 colour. 320 x 256, 2 colour. 160 x 256, 8 colour (they claimed 16 but 8 of them were flashing combinations of the other 8). 160 x 256, 4 colour.
zx spectrum 48k version or 128k? I ask this question as the two versions are very different:) PS played this to death in the day and upset quit a few girls lol
I was always in a cargo hold of mine brothers ship ^^ like a portable ninja for saboteur missions on a space stations ^^ sometimes peoples became games they played before and we played on a cheaper version)
I remember rumours at my school and among friends that they made a version for the beeb second processor that had all sorts of extra random encounters like Thargoid Fleets in open space and Generation ships. I would love to know if there was any truth in that. Luv and Peace.
There was if you were lucky enough to have the z80 coprocessor add on, which was about £300 so i remember. The disk version had more content than the cassette version as well. Getting a disk drive for the Model B was like getting a hard drive and it really opened it up in terms of what you could do in the time that you had. Burning software to eeprom i also did a fair bit of although I never did elite it was mostly Disk operating systems, and the Edward and Word word processors we were pirating.
Mandrak789 Almost certain that's the emulation. As someone who spent hours of my childhood with those ships spinning in the corner of my room on my Cub, it never broke up like that on the actual machine.
alex ojideagu Pretty sure the Beeb version didn't flicker like that on a CRT of the day. I don't think my Electron version did. But now you've got me wondering. I do own all four versions (Beeb, Spectrum, Electron and C64). Trouble is, I don't have a working CRT anymore to compare.
In the video he said even reviews back AT THE TIME mentioned the flickering on the BBC version. That's what's got me hung up. If that's true that's a big piece of evidence of it NOT being just the emulator. I have no idea if that information (what he said in the video) is actually true though.
The Beeb version did flicker. I played it back in the day. The Spectrum version has enough RAM to buffer the graphics, time them with the refresh, and make them flicker free. Lack of RAM was the Beeb's flaw. It had some nice high res modes, but not enough RAM to exploit them, unless the program was loaded in chunks from a floppy disk.
5:29 Hell I notice the same thing still in brand new, modern games. Things that are supposed to be a perfect circle, if you look really closely, are really just made up of a series of straight lines. The more lines they use, the more circular it appears, but even to this day they still use that method. You're just seeing more straight lines (i.e. more pixels, more resolution) than in the old days.
Does the BBC have a higher clocked 6502 than the c64 ? IIRC C64 was slower than the speccy version. Given that C64 & BBC share the same CPU what accounts for the difference here ?
The C64 had a 6510 (6502 + memory bank switching), clocked at 1MHz. The BBC machine had a 6502 clocked at 2MHz. The VIC-II chip in the C64 provided hardware scrolling and sprites, which gave it an advantage for many games, but was no help displaying these wire-frame graphics.
20mins to load? No way. Don't believe that. It didn't even take 10mins to load the game on the Acorn Electron. I can't tell the difference between my BBC version of Elite and my Acorn Electron version of the game and the Electron was lots less powerful.
***** Except of course, IIRC, the Electron version only had one galaxy, no colour, I did find it to be a little slower (but not much), and the docking computer was (usefully) instantaneous. Did the Electron version have the two missions though? I cant remember, which is terrible given I played it for about 6 months. :D Overall though, I prefer the C64 version.
mapesdhs I can't recall 2 missions in the Electron version. :/ I'm going to have to dig out my Electron from my collection now and have a play on Elite. Though I do prefer the BBC basic versions of the game to any other.
One point. At 0:22 you say: "On paper Spectrum seems to win dramatically with faster processor..." Z80 on 3,5Mhz IS NOT faster then 6502 on 2Mhz. Besides CPU speed IS NOT the same as the computer speed. In those days type of chip-set, memory controller and especially raw memory speed influenced performance heavily. According to basic benchmarks in those days, BBC B was roughly 3,5-4x faster then ZX Spectrum. And was much more expensive, of course...
***** It's more subtle than that. If you were using contended memory on the Spectrum (the memory that the frame buffer used) the BBC was about 3 times faster, but outside of contended memory the raw processing speed was only about 1.5 times faster. The BBC was an awesome machine (I have three!) but the Spectrum was a marvellous piece of economic design and had terrific bang for the buck.
There was also the other version of Elite for the BBC Micro, which you needed a second hardware co-processor upgrade to play. th-cam.com/video/nIuOjEqY8Hk/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/8Pbt6jT49RE/w-d-xo.html
More like the BBC version. The best 8 bit versions are the unofficial Plus 4 and C128 versions. They are the fastest two. The C64 certainly has the potential to make a faster version of elite than the BBC/Spectrum as it's a much faster machine but it wasn't fully utilised.
The C64 was terrible for 3d. Checkout starglider (ok, awful conversion) or driller. I think only mercenary managed to pull off a decent frame rate. The CPU was simply too slow.
I thought that there was a double buffered (no flicker) version for the Master, but can only find this bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2088 which is really quite hard as the AI "thinks" and acts faster! It probably has the enhanced AI, I'm not good enough to know.
Have you tried it yet? I loaded the 128 TAP into an emulator (Fuse) and ran it at 200% (about 7MHz). At double speed it works well. Much above that and it gets too difficult to control.
Nice review. I grew up with Elite on ZX Spectrum, judging from your video BBC version is just too easy, throwing money at you and with dumb opponents. What irritates me, is also the planet/station flickering on BBC and the planets looking everything else just not as planets. Also this makes me proud, because as a kid I reached status Dangerous in the Spectrum version. For me (very biased) Elite on ZX Spectrum is the winner ;-)
***** I think Acornsoft must have revised the AI for post-Beeb versions. Watching the vid, enemies on my Electron version were more like what this vid showed the Specrum's version as having. No flickering though, pretty sure that's just the emulator. Agree about the planets looking odd with their fast spinning, hence I'm glad the Electron didn't have that. You're wrong about the money though, the Beeb version is just showing the pilot's total cash, not the per-ship award. Going to uni interupted my playing the Electron version, was probably close to Elite, but still Deadly by the time studies took over. In the meantime though, I reached Deadly on my friend's C64 aswell (though we lived 400 miles apart, so I couldn't play both). Drew's right about the Spectrum's AI, missions & immersion (think the C64 version had some of these touches too), but if the emulated frame rate is accurate I think that would drive me crazy. :D Overall though, before watching this vid, I hadn't realised the versions differed so much. Very interesting! Btw, the music on the C64 version is absolutely brilliant, likewise the Energy Bomb effect was the best of any version IMO. While playing though, I did miss the Electron's instant-docking side effect of the simplified docking computer, sooo useful for getting out of sticky situations.
Yeah, even though I was a 'Speccy' - the BEEB version was the best. It just played better, the sound effects were (of course) better and it generated better atmosphere. The Speecy version was decent but seemed like a lazy port to me when it was finally released. When it arrived on the Amiga it was pretty good but again, nowhere near as good as it should have been.
Agreed. Being a former BBC Elite gamer, when the Amiga version came out I was really disappointed. A small letterbox screen with solid vector but SLOW graphics. Would have much preferred they stuck with wireframe but made it lighting fast/smooth plus a far bigger screen/field of view. Obviously too quick to go solid 3D route at the expense of sacrificing gameplay.
couple of other points. The combat on the BBC was easier, but the Vipers were very dangerous. You didn't risk an offender rating if you could help it. On the spectrum they were much less fearsome. The animation was jumpy and inaccurate on the spectrum at short range. Docking at slow speed was impossible because the slot darted around randomly. Detecting laser hits was dodgy. You showed yourself an experienced spectrum player by concentrating your fire on the rear of the Python - hits on the nose did nothing.
![Обзор Elite Legend 128k. 2021. ZX Spectrum [MOD]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tZ1pqtUAw5o/mqdefault.jpg)
It took about 5 minutes, not 20 minutes to load Elite on the Speccy! At 1500 baud (average) the Spectrum would fill memory in 320 seconds (just over 5 minutes) so no game could have ever taken 20 minutes to load. Most games had flash loaders too with a higher bit rate.
Also the BBC Micro didn't come with a disc drive, it was an add-on extra. You could get disc drives for the Spectrum too, such as the Opus Discovery (Opus a major maker of BBC Micro disc drives too). A BBC Micro with a disc drive would have cost over £500.
On a real BBC Micro, there is very little flicker - I think the flicker you saw is an artefact of the emulation.
74HC138 There is always much exaggeration on Speccy loading times even 128k games were not much more than 6 to 7 mins ..Mastertronic/Ocean/Imagine/Domark to name but a few were using hyperload coding which reduced tape loading a lot. you hear "half hour to load" from folk that never actually owned a computer back in the day it's anther Mythical fact that those that were not part of the scene like to add to just "fit in". I'm proud to have at least been part of it even to the point of typing in code from BIG K magazine .. corrected errors and got a game running ..saved to tape both on a Vic 20 and a Spectrum. The retroscene is starting to come across as a polished format now as facts and myths are slowly but surely being separated from each other this is very important if we want future generations to have a true representation of how things really were back in our/my day (assuming we're all at least in our 40's lol)
+74HC138 sorry for the late reply, but I'm guessing the flicker is a side effect of TH-cam rendering the footage as 30fps vs the BBC's native 50hz. Because of that, images stay on the screen longer (or might be missed entirely) so flicker that may have been barely noticeable in the game really stands out. TH-cam can show 50/60fps videos now, but they only added that pretty recently and you'd have to be capturing it at that rate to begin with for it to display right.
I always remember waiting getting on for 20 minutes for Football Manager to load from Cassette on my old C64 lol.
As someone who's owned a Speccy for thirty two years, I think the "twenty minute to load" complaints were probably confabulated memories of playing games like The Bard's Tale, where you had to load separate areas from multiple tapes.
I had one of those weird little microdrive infinite tape systems, it was very fast but super unreliable unfortunately so half the time I'd find it wouldn't load and I'd have to hook up the cassette recorder anyway.
I played both versions a lot - BBC at school after hours, and Speccy version at home (damn Lenslok!). Two fun facts with the Speccy version:
1. It didn't care about your rotation when docking. As long as you lined up with the middle, you could be sideways and everything was fine.
2. It has this amazing exploit. Launch from a station, stop, turn around, enable hyperspace, and while it's counting down, dock again (remember - rotation doesn't matter!). The hyperspace countdown will end during the docking anim, and now the game says you are (a) in the new system and (b) docked. Much easier than all that faffing with a jump drive! So you could make a trade every 30 seconds or so and make masses of money very quickly!
Tom Forsyth I figured this out myself as a young lad, saved a lot of time...
OMG FRONTIER PLZ NERF!!!
Ah, you cheaters!!! Be ashamed!!1!! ;-) :-)
First I saw of Elite was in an IT class in senior school when I was abut 15, the teacher brought in his BBC Model B and spun up Elite on it
Thumbs up, who is older than this game
It's probably already been mentioned here. But the faster framerate on the Beeb is largely due to a clever programming trick. It drew 'half' of the lines for the ship/s on one frame, and the other half on the next! The result is a more flickery but higher framerate. The Speccy developers only had screenshots to work from and were given none of the hacks/optimisations that the Beeb devs learned. I think they did a grand job nonetheless! I grew up with the Beeb, but I give this competition to the Spectrum! The Beeb tape version has zero missions, and only a fraction of the ships/equipment that the Spectrum has. A tape to tape comparison is fairer after all.
The BBC version displays your total updated credits when you destroy another ship, not just the credits the kill has earned you. This confused me too when I played the emulated game a few years ago - the credits didn't add up - so I looked at the manual on Ian Bell's website and got the answer.
Sorry, did I hear you right? 20 minutes to load a spectrum game...?! Not on any spectrum I had!
From memory, I never had a game that took longer than 5/6 minutes, max! Elite. One of them.
Interesting comparison, but I'm not sure I can trust what's being said.
I remember Football Manager on the C64 took 22 mins to load.
Used to eat me dinner or have a shower while it was loading and still end up waiting lol
Your quite right, ZX Spectrum was 5 min max, only the C64 would take over 20mins, until the fast loader became a thing.....
Yup, I have to agree. The longest I ever waited on a game loading was the 128K starglider version on the Speccy, and that was only 15 minutes.
@@bigdaz7272 the baud rate of the speccy tape was much higher than the c64 one of many things that was superior on the speccy. Thus 20 minutes is just ignorance or a lie.
yeah, even the slowest non turbo loaders on the spectrum 48 the longest load time was never more than 5 mins, including a loading screen. A 128k game could theoretically be just over 2 and a half times that, with Starglider, Where time stood still and Carrier command all coming in at around 10-11 mins.
Drew, you just took me back 34 years... I'm eternally grateful for this: 34 years in 23 minutes. Now THAT's warp drive speed! ;-)
A very enjoyable review Drew! There are so many subtle and not so subtle differences between all of the different versions of Elite. I hope you have the time to pair off another two versions of sometime :-)
Oh, I see a dirty but interesting hack BBC version used to escalate framerate. They do not draw objects completely, before the frame is shown. Each frame they draw only a fraction on the object wireframe vectors they have. The upcoming vectors are drawn on the next frame. Rarely we see most of the lines on the screen at the same time. On the other hand, ZX version had to draw every frame completely before it was shown on the screen. Additionally is plays sounds using CPU power only, no BBC-like sound procedures offload. So technically ZX version is more "honest", but BBC is more cunning)
+Анна Макарова Fully agree, on bbc you clearly see the flickering in wire frame gfx. zx does not have this defect. this imply a kind of back buffer and the need to bitblt the entire backbuffer in Video RAM. of course this have a negative impact on FPS on machines without gfx acceleration or DMA. It's not a fair comparison due to differences
That was fascinating! Declaration of interest: I have a BBC (Model B+) and enjoy Elite on that (though I'm not much good at it!) but I've never played Spectrum Elite. Anyway, this seemed like a pretty fair review, though using emulated versions does rob the Beeb of one major advantage: it had a far better keyboard than the Spectrum, which made a big difference in this game given the large number of keys in play.
Actually, the keyboard of the 48kB rubber keyed Spectrum is a bliss when playing things like Elite.
The keyboard overlay was something normal keyboards could not handle, and handy it was/is!
I had all the keys I needed in my left hand (accelerating with space and breaking with symbol shift under my thumb) plus one finger always hovering over the E button to counter incoming missiles, another one over the W (energy bomb IIRC) and the little finger operated the mighty guns on the A key! Thus the escape capsule on W was also always at the ready.
To the right there was a Quickshot II joystick firmly sucked onto the table's smooth surface for maneuvering.
That setup served me through all the ranks up to ELITE, finally.
@@seraphinberktold7087 Ah well, probably things are a bit different at your exalted level! I was never nearly that good. I found (and still do) the Beeb one easier, but maybe if I'd ever got anywhere near Elite level things might have been different.
That missile hit was some what cinematic moment actually. The game still holds up to this day.
It's 2017 and I'm still amazed, how good Elite Dangerous looks. I still wonder what would've happened if you'd shown E:D alongside Elite in 1984. How many heads would explode... :D
Played Elite on spectrum 128k using disks. It was awesome. Used the insta-jump exploit a lot, but my save got destroyed with the "supernova" mission, because when i exited the station i got killed all the time. Got to "Dangerous" though. Ah the days!
Thanks for comparison, Drew!
Elite on the Speccy could have run faster, there are other games that do it. Starion, for example. It was 1985, most programmers still couldn't take the most out of the machine. And I bet the ones that could were secretive about their tricks. I think an Elite reprogrammed by a good 3D wiz could run as well as the BBC version.
That little 48k gave me more years of pleasure than any top end PC does now. I think I spent 5 years playing Sir Fred and got to about level 7, my bro couldnt get past level 2, hard but so addictive.
Kladov's version Elite for ZX Spectrum vin 12:0. This is fantastic. ZX Forever!
Feels like a shame to quibble about frame rate, when these were 8-bit processors. Just managing 3D at all, was a massive achievement. I do recall some 128K games taking 15 minutes to load, but those used the full 128K of memory.
Don't know if anyone had pointed it out yet, but the additional dodecahedron stations, as well as the landing view were new additions with the floppy disc version, they weren't on the tape version. As someone who grew up playing this on the BBC B though, I always thought the speccy version looked terrible :)
Thanks! Loved watching this. I spent soooo much time on the Spectrum version in the 80's. Always remember holding that little plastic decoder up to the screen and trying to decipher what the heck it said!! :D And now, 35 years later, I'm playing ELite Dangerous.
If you have a look through my ZX Spectrum vids you'll find short episodes on the special Spectrum missions in Elite. :)
Would like to see an addendum with comparisons including the C64 and other versions too
About the other versions... When I was a kid, I was both luck and unlucky because I had a PC/XT compatible... Loved it, but in Hungary it was somewhat hard to get games for it. But I remember playing at least 2 different versions of Elite for DOS... If I remember well, they were a bit faster, and the later version (Elite Plus) was prettier too.
Framerate on the ZX gets exponentially worse as more points need to be plotted per second. Also you should be comparing whatever was the latest update to Elite on the Acorn machines at the time of the Firebird licensed conversions to ZX/CPC/C64 etc rather than the original release (if that is what you are comparing). Possibly the Master 128 version is the best on Acorn.
The Z80's 16 bit maths calculations in the spectrum were WAY faster than the beebs 6502 based cpu which is why the spectrum game wasn't a flickering mess when it calculated those 3D shapes. I think the flickering was an attempt by the coders to take some pressure off the poor beebs cpu and help prevent it from chugging even more than it was by doing less draw calls.
No idea where you get the idea that the beebs cpu was "a lot more efficient"
Jooeffoh no the flickering was because the BBC didn't have enough memory to double buffer the display, so if the drawing took longer than the vertical retrace you'd get flicker. The spectrum and CPC had enough memory to draw the next frame off screen and just tell the video chip to display that offscreen buffer next refresh.
And if Beeb had enough memory for the buffer it would have been slower.
Not really, because you could display the other buffer without having to copy it by pointing the CRTC at the new start of screen address. A standard BBC can do this with the 10K modes but for a 20K mode you'd need to use shadow RAM which was only available on later models such as the BBC Master.
How does having an extra buffer help if the CPU cannot supply the calculations fast enough (as is evident by the fact it cannot supply a consistent FPS) doing so would cause extra overhead for the memory bandwidth thus creating a slow down overall. Unless my memory is failing me on this, the Beeb (without tube Coprocessor) is a CPU driven system without chips taking the workload off the CPU.
Having the screen double buffered would not have made it slower, just flicker free. It of course would not make things faster, but switching between the two display regions would be instant - no need to block copy an off screen region into screen RAM - something which I believe the Z80 on the Speccy was quite good at.
On the BBC B (and later related models) there is no contention between the CPU and the CRTC for accessing the RAM - the RAM is clocked at 4MHz and the 2MHz CPU and CRTC access the RAM on opposing cycles. The Electron (and Archimedes) is different though and it does suffer from contention.
Good comparison here Drew. I write this as ELITE has just turned up on Royal Mail stamps (although the ELITE one is 2nd class postage).
I remember playing this on BBC at a mate's house and waiting sooo long for it to come out on the ZX Spectrum.
On the BBC we played for hours shooting the vipers as they exited the space station and holding down the hyperspace key (to pause the countdown) until just before the last little bit of shield was wiped out and then jumping to the next system.
The Speccy version had little of this and I remember the gameplay being more toned down and less exciting.
Here are my thoughts on the ZX Spectum version...
Load screen was very poor.
ZX Spectrum embellishments didn't add anything to the pace of the BBC game
Hyperspace jump sound was disappointingly short and I still don't know what it was meant to be.
There were never any explosions, or explosion debris, dust etc, just a red circle. Why?
Sound effects were very poor and nothing like up to the BBC standard
No Dodo space stations..what?
I'm pretty sure that no company of Vipers rained havoc on you if you shot at the space station.
So yes. I totally agree with your verdict. I played both for hours and am - - - - ELITE - - - - on both platforms.
Both very good. BBC B version (particularly disc version) is and was always king.
Thanks so much!
The Speccy version's space station police definitely would blast you if you attacked the station, or started trouble with other ships nearby the station.
i do not know the BBC version,but the gameplay in Spectrum version allowed direct hyperspace- docking jump by doing a normal docking and activating hyperspace jump
Used to love playing this as a kid, I did download it a few months back using an emulator. While the graphics now look dated but amazing the gameplay is still superb
It seems to be an easy (lazy) conversion. Vectors can be really fast on ZX, see Star Wars game or scene productions. Each of the counters could be in a different colour, not all white on red. It's the same use of RAM and CPU.
I doubt it was easy. The original was in 6502 assembly, and the Speccy had a Z80A. Totally different code.
The BBC version had a fully working docking computer- you could sit back and watch it line up with the space station, match rotation and land. The Spectrum version didn't do any of that, it just said, 'Oh, you've landed!'. The Spectrum version had several bugs including: occasional zero altitude space stations- you could get really close to them but if you tried to land in one you hit the planet surface; infinite altitude space stations- as you approached the planet the director said the space station was behind you. If you turned round and followed the director it eventually just disappeared; missiles that flew the same speed as the object they were targetted on to- the two objects just wandered around on the scanner until you landed. I'm one of those sad individuals that got to Elite status the hard way- on the Beeb! Does anyone remember the missions you got sent on?
nice wee return to my childhood there Drew, cheers! My dad had a BBC Micro B. No idea how he managed to afford it as we connected it to one of the roundest 13" TVs I remember ever seeing :D
However there was no way we could afford £300 compared to £100 for a computer and don't forget you wiggled the ram pack after 11 months,crashed the speccy ,took it back to the shop and got a brand new one with another years guarantee.
Elite was so amazing on either of these machines though along with almost anything by Beyond
Really nice review and very interesting to see the original Elites gameplay because I never had this game myself. Even though I had the Spectrum I missed Elite through going off to Poly just around the time it came out. But its funny how you still get excited watching gameplay like that - you can see why these sorts of games blew people away back then.
Errr. How many people had disc drives with the BBC for home, actually how many people had the BBC at home period, let alone a disk drive. As for the Spectrum loading time you say you are comparing 32K BBC vs 48K Spectrum, then load the 128K Spectrum version? Loading this from Microdrive would trounce the BBC. As for graphics this was poorly coded on the Spectrum..
Spectrum 128K version worked on the 48K and had the added advantage of not having the Lenslok.
Speccy version probably got slowed down a bit, because of it's crazy screen map layout, optimised for aligned character printing which could then just INC H register (add 256 to the pointer address) to move down to the next line on the screen but only for (aligned) 8 lines. That's why loading its screens load funny in bits, as the screen lines aren't consecutive in memory. Makes line drawing routines a real pain! BBC screen memory was nice and easy to deal with, and a 6502 at 2MHZ is a fair match for a 3.5MHZ z80, and lines etc. would have been much easier to draw.!
People get confused about the loading times of the spectrum cause they were thinking that a game was on a 30 min per side tape, while mosy games were recorded on short tapes. In fact i had many 60 min tapes with more than 7-10 games per side. If the 20 min load time myth was true , we would only be able to pirate only 1 game per side. So people get your facts right. You can say that maybe with bad tapes and recorder it could lead to faulty loads ,and spend half an hour trying to load. C64 on the other hand was very slow at loading
Yep 6502 was more efficient as per instruction but was heavily register starved hence why it was the cheap cpu option. Great compare thanks, its close but seems too be more in the spectrum version game wise
billy blogs I found coding for the 6502 meant thinking carefully about how to use the registers, and one could get a speed boost from using page 0 locations for game variables.
I don't remember the two playing so differently but now I know why I made it to Elite on the school's BBC but not my Spectrum.
Great video this for me as Elite was my favourite game - which I played firstly on a BBC (which my Dad borrowed from work) and then later on a Spectrum which was my first computer. The BBC version really got the adrenalin going whereas the Spectrum version was more pretty and atmospheric.
The BBC version looks so much smoother. The spectrum framerate would do my head in
No way it had that low a framerate, not even close. I had a 128k +2, the one with the built in tape deck, would that matter? I'm 45 now and was 9 at the time so who knows haha. I also don't remember it having those exact sound effects, it's very strange. Another thing: I only played to Dangerous but I never saw a single mission offered to me. It wasn't until Elite Dangerous launched and I started looking into things that I realised missions were supposed to be part of the game.
Thanks for a trip down memory lane.. Never really compared the various ports, but I do wonder if coders who wrote the Speccy version (and other platform ports) had any access to the full original sources. It's not the kind of game that too many people could have written way back in 1985, let alone today.
I had the best of both worlds, BBC Micro at school and the ZX Speccy waiting for me at home.
Would have been nice to see a C64 comparison also. The display area on the C64 had more colours and was probably clearer than the BBC's (though the dual colour display on the Spectrum looks really good). I would have thought the C64 could have handled the planet rotation graphics (which look great imo). I'm also surprised the C64 didn't have the better sound of the BBC version with it's SID chip. I think the C64 version is basically the same as the BBC'c being made by the same programmers as the BBC original but not as optimised for the machine. I think I like the Spectrum's display more but other than that I think the Spectrum's programmer mimicked the C64 version.
Good comparison.
I got to Elite on the 48k version, although i assume you got there a lot quicker on the beeb as your rewards were notably higher enabling you to upgrade quicker, alongside the higher framerate.
All in all it was a thoroughly immersive game and you got used to the frame rate.
It would be good to see the ending on different machines.
I was a Spectrum owner too, but I didn't get to play Elite until I got it on the Atari ST in 1992. That version was fantastic though with great sound and full colour graphics. I bought a copy of the Spectrum Elite on eBay some years later but at that point it just didn't compare. Starion was a much better game on the Speccy. Smoother and much more exciting.
Played Oolite?
i had it on my spectrum 128+2,and it was the game that made me a gamer.
The Spectrum 128k version of Elite would win hands down, as would most 128 versions of all Speccy games it's a shame that people tend to stay stuck in the 48k era which died in 1985
curiously playing 128k version on spectrum??? on a 48k emulator?
The flicking on the BBC is caused by the emulator - the frame rate was smooth when I played Elite way back when.
Comparing apples and pears here I think, a fairer comparison would be the enhanced BBC version vs the Spectrum as isn’t this using the later Soectrums full 128k RAM compared to the 32K BBC version shown here?
The enhanced (or second processor ) version was imo the best of the lot, much more faithful to the original without the limitations of the BBC’B.
Back in the day, I owned this on the Spectrum, Electron, BBC (and about 10 years later I got a 6502 second processor from a boot sale!) ST, PC and Archimedes.
For me, the best of them all was the 2nd processor version, which I still play to this day on an emulator which incidentally flickers which the original hardware didn’t.
Out of all the machines I list above, I regret selling the BBC’B the most.
Elite was-is going to be forever! Long live the legend!)))
I don't think it's fair to compare loading times when the equivalent Beeb didn't have a disk drive. Apart from that, it seems that the Beeb version keeps loading things in from disk during play, whereas the Speccy version, once loaded, didn't require further loading.
Perhaps the Beeb flickering wasn't an issue on a CRT (I have a vague uneducated thought about some sort of scanline sync) but the extra speed probably made for more fun battles.
~£335 (Beeb in 1983) is ~£1000 in today's money
~£130 (Speccy in 1983) is ~£400 in today's money
Not really comparable, is it? But it's remarkable to see what you could get out of a Speccy, considering the price difference between it and its closest rivals - Beeb, C64, Amstrad.
The Speccy was a computer for the masses and (as far as I'm aware) Speccy sales trounced those of any other computer at the time in the UK - moreso when you only count what matters - sales to individuals rather than to schools. It was seemingly the C64 in the USA, but then it seems to be the Mac there now, which is nice, but hugely expensive compared to a PC. They must have more spending power (or access to credit) than we do...
The Acorn BBC B (32K) was £399. Early adopters got it for £350, but the price soon rose and stayed there. Did it fall in price when Acorn was trying to recover from a glut of Electrons? I remember the Electron falling in price. The disc drive was another £400. The Beeb needed fast storage though, as it only had 32K RAM. Much of that RAM was used up if you used high resolution. It wasn't until 1984, that the B+ model was launched with more RAM, including 20K set aside for the display.
A tad late, but if the Bounty system on the BBC micro was anything like the Commodore 64 then what you see on your flight-screen is not the bounty, but your total sum of credits. so for the first ship the bounty is not 90 credits bounty, but rather 20 credits, just like the spectrum.
Also for the lines (if anything like the C64 version) on the planets to be turned off, press pause, then press P. and the crater and rotating lines are turned off. There was a long range of settings that could be turned on and off during pause(frozen). Inverse controls, damp and so on. if they are also valid on the BBC I dont know, but i guess it would be similar key chart since as i understand it, that they both have function keys.
Here is a link to the key chart for the c64 version.
stiggyblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/dscf0009-1024x765.jpg
BBC model B at 399 did not include a disc drive and they were very expensive. The BBC version on cassette had less ships than the disc version which already had less ships than the Spectrum. BBC version did screen flicker quite badly but not as bad as the C64, the Spectrum version did redraw a bit slower but it was solid and while I noticed some graphics corruption on the video that didn't actually occur (Emulation/LCD screen problems??) BBC had nicer colours but text suffered with a lower resolution. Sound was far better on the BBC but if that's your thing the C64 was better still.
Bought Elite on disc for the BBC before I even owned the computer. Bought a Spectrum so that I could play Elite on it. BTW Spectrum 128K version works fine on the 48K system and doesn't have the terrible Lenslok.
Overall the Spectrum version was better but not by much. But Elite on the BBC was a monumental moment for me.
Just nitpicking but baud isn't bits per second but signal state change per second. If your modulation has more than two possible states, then your bit rate will be higher than baud rate.
It is possible to have 1200 baud modem with 1200 bps but many 1200 bps modems were 600 baud modems with phase shift keying delivering two bits per symbol.
I think the Python has more armour than the Krait or the Cobra, so I guess that's why it needet to be hit more often on the Spectrum.
Elite doesn’t take even nearly 20 minutes to load in the Spectrum 48k and that is almost identical. In hundreds of hours and only noticed one difference. A space station doesn’t launch vipers if you attack it in the 48k version. But let’s face it, you only ever do that once… just to see what happens (you die) 48k load I just timed it at 5 minutes 3 seconds. The pita was Lenslok at the end. I have had a spectrum since April 1983 ( not the same one, about 15 altogether now) The longest load time for any game I’ve seen on the 48k is Doomdarks Revenge which put up a loading screen, then over wrote quite a bit of it with the games starting conditions which were used once to start the game…. Then lost. If you wanted to restart..l you had to reload as the game didn’t store those starting conditions anywhere else.
The Spectrum version was often rated more highly than the BBC version and I've heard a few people say it was the best version, ahead of the BBC version.
You're comparing the apparent frame rates of the BBC vs the Spectrum versions of Elite but am I right that you're running them on emulators (PC based)?
If so wouldn't that mean you're only really seeing the differences in how well the emulators are running the code?
To get a true comparison you would need to get hold of the original hardware.
Emulators for both the BBC and Spectrum were approximately correct in speed. While some emulators for systems (including PC just check out DOSBox) will be completely at the whim of the system doing the emulation plus some timing alterations. Obviously for true comparison emulation is a bit off.
4 min 35 seconds for Spectrum version, 45 seconds from microdrive, about 20 seconds from +3 disk.
Enjoyed the video, From memory, the BBC did flicker a bit. Probably lack of double buffering, I read once that using a screen buffer could take up 20k of the BBC's 32k. Any chance of doing a comparison between the BBC and the Nintendo NES version?
I personally think the NES version is the best 8 bit version by a long way. I owned the bbc version back in the day and then later the Spectrum 128k both on real hardware. I have to say that like many things you always remember your 'first' with the greatest affection/rose tint. 😂
i just saw a video showing a NES port of Elite with an Ian bell quote "best version". Did you try the NES version Drew Wagar ? i wonder how it compares to the zx or bbc.
I played both versions.
I think Speccy version had a tidy, uncluttered feel to it which made it feel more 'real' and atmospheric.
Whereas as the BBC version, in terms of display, seemed a bit naff.
I like your review and I certainly like the fact that you were fair as to give the Beeb the prize on this.
I am more of a Spectrum fan as well but I love the Beeb. As what it comes to Elite, the Beeb version really trounces those in nearly all other formats except for the Archimedes, imho.
I also think loading times either from disc or tape shouldn't come into play here because the Beeb didn't come with a disc drive as well. It cost more than the machine itself to add a drive to it. There's a cassette version of BBC's Elite (released in 1984) and it probably took at least as long as on the Spectrum to get loaded in, if I'm not mistaken.
The Beeb version actually makes use of a programming technique displaying two different graphics modes on screen simultaneously. The Spectrum has no real text mode and a higher resolution. It's probably just too many bytes to update at once with that Spectrum resolution and that "game window", and I mean even if the Spectrum had a 6502 CPU instead of the Z80A. Perhaps if the game-play area in the Speccy would be narrower or something, certainly there would be less bytes to move around and we there'd be a performance increase.
Beeb's Elite is indeed a masterpiece. Sound effects, graphics, programming techniques... everything in it is very well thought of and well crafted.
The Spectrum version is fun, I love it and never really had played the BBC version until some years ago but there's no question that the Beeb takes the cake here.
Unfortunately I'm not as good an Elite player as I used to be (or any good at any other game for what it matters). Recently I had a crack at Elite on my Beeb and took nearly an hour to get the grips at docking the ship to the station. Simply couldn't recall how to get that right lol.
+Wilton Abreu Actually they DID use different modes on the Spectrum version of Elite for the screen. Only by Modes I mean different sections of the program. The top 2/3rd was updated by one part, while the bottom 1/3rd was done by another part. If they hadn't done it that way Elite would have been so slow it would be unplayable ;-)
What you might be willing to say is that the bottom part was updated only when there was a change, while the top section was updated every possible frame. That I agree.
There's no different screen modes in the Spectrum, mate. It's all 256x192 pixels, the characters are drawn on screen as bitmaps exactly like anything else.
Wilton Abreu
I know that, but, when compared to other systems of the time, that was as close as Speccy programmers could get to different modes ;-)
That's right. Cheers!
Price then for bbc disk drive and extra price of elite means u would need an extra £400-£600
How does the Amstrad version compare to BBC + ZX Spectrum
The ZX loading screen is mostly noted for being a tedious place.
ZX Spectrum is the best ^^
Opinions are of ourselves. I am a Spectrum owner but BBC Elite was far better.
Your specs for the beeb graphics modes are wrong.
640 x 256, 2 colour.
320 x 256, 4 colour.
320 x 256, 2 colour.
160 x 256, 8 colour (they claimed 16 but 8 of them were flashing combinations of the other 8).
160 x 256, 4 colour.
zx spectrum 48k version or 128k?
I ask this question as the two versions are very different:)
PS played this to death in the day and upset quit a few girls lol
True, though the Russian spectrum clones had even faster clock speeds. So anyone with the source code could have created an even smoother version.
I was always in a cargo hold of mine brothers ship ^^ like a portable ninja for saboteur missions on a space stations ^^ sometimes peoples became games they played before and we played on a cheaper version)
I remember rumours at my school and among friends that they made a version for the beeb second processor that had all sorts of extra random encounters like Thargoid Fleets in open space and Generation ships.
I would love to know if there was any truth in that.
Luv and Peace.
There was if you were lucky enough to have the z80 coprocessor add on, which was about £300 so i remember. The disk version had more content than the cassette version as well. Getting a disk drive for the Model B was like getting a hard drive and it really opened it up in terms of what you could do in the time that you had. Burning software to eeprom i also did a fair bit of although I never did elite it was mostly Disk operating systems, and the Edward and Word word processors we were pirating.
It's true! You need a hardware add on though
Great review, any chance of you doing the Archimedes version?
what about the C64 version? Saw there was a new flicker free version released
10:24 probably spent half my childhood playing the bbc b version of this and I've never seen that screen before?
+maniq minah I believe they were only in the disk version.
+phil tillson ah, thanks...
BBC version looks faster but that flickering is awful, it's like good portion of the frames aren't even being drawn
Mandrak789 Almost certain that's the emulation. As someone who spent hours of my childhood with those ships spinning in the corner of my room on my Cub, it never broke up like that on the actual machine.
Mandrak789 I'd take the BBC flicking any day over that jerky framerate on the Spectrum.
alex ojideagu Pretty sure the Beeb version didn't flicker like that on a CRT of the day. I don't think my Electron version did.
But now you've got me wondering. I do own all four versions (Beeb, Spectrum, Electron and C64). Trouble is, I don't have a working CRT anymore to compare.
In the video he said even reviews back AT THE TIME mentioned the flickering on the BBC version. That's what's got me hung up. If that's true that's a big piece of evidence of it NOT being just the emulator. I have no idea if that information (what he said in the video) is actually true though.
The Beeb version did flicker. I played it back in the day. The Spectrum version has enough RAM to buffer the graphics, time them with the refresh, and make them flicker free. Lack of RAM was the Beeb's flaw. It had some nice high res modes, but not enough RAM to exploit them, unless the program was loaded in chunks from a floppy disk.
5:29
Hell I notice the same thing still in brand new, modern games. Things that are supposed to be a perfect circle, if you look really closely, are really just made up of a series of straight lines. The more lines they use, the more circular it appears, but even to this day they still use that method. You're just seeing more straight lines (i.e. more pixels, more resolution) than in the old days.
Some people think the Earth is flat for the same reason.
Where do all the stars come from?
Does the BBC have a higher clocked 6502 than the c64 ? IIRC C64 was slower than the speccy version. Given that C64 & BBC share the same CPU what accounts for the difference here ?
The C64 had a 6510 (6502 + memory bank switching), clocked at 1MHz. The BBC machine had a 6502 clocked at 2MHz. The VIC-II chip in the C64 provided hardware scrolling and sprites, which gave it an advantage for many games, but was no help displaying these wire-frame graphics.
20mins to load? No way. Don't believe that. It didn't even take 10mins to load the game on the Acorn Electron. I can't tell the difference between my BBC version of Elite and my Acorn Electron version of the game and the Electron was lots less powerful.
***** Except of course, IIRC, the Electron version only had one galaxy, no colour, I did find it to be a little slower (but not much), and the docking computer was (usefully) instantaneous. Did the Electron version have the two missions though? I cant remember, which is terrible given I played it for about 6 months. :D Overall though, I prefer the C64 version.
mapesdhs I can't recall 2 missions in the Electron version. :/ I'm going to have to dig out my Electron from my collection now and have a play on Elite. Though I do prefer the BBC basic versions of the game to any other.
+mapesdhs The Electron version also showed the planets as simple rings rather than having a rotation animation. No suns either.
Correct! Ahh, the sacrifices... :D
The C64 version was the best :)
lol no
One point. At 0:22 you say: "On paper Spectrum seems to win dramatically with faster processor..." Z80 on 3,5Mhz IS NOT faster then 6502 on 2Mhz. Besides CPU speed IS NOT the same as the computer speed. In those days type of chip-set, memory controller and especially raw memory speed influenced performance heavily. According to basic benchmarks in those days, BBC B was roughly 3,5-4x faster then ZX Spectrum. And was much more expensive, of course...
***** It's more subtle than that. If you were using contended memory on the Spectrum (the memory that the frame buffer used) the BBC was about 3 times faster, but outside of contended memory the raw processing speed was only about 1.5 times faster. The BBC was an awesome machine (I have three!) but the Spectrum was a marvellous piece of economic design and had terrific bang for the buck.
is this Drew from Suntest??
Everyone prefers the speccy...........dont they? :)
There was also the other version of Elite for the BBC Micro, which you needed a second hardware co-processor upgrade to play. th-cam.com/video/nIuOjEqY8Hk/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/8Pbt6jT49RE/w-d-xo.html
Both version were fantastic and JUST remember this is where the GAMES industry came from!!
Before SHARE HOLDERS FUCKED IT UP BASICALLY!!:/
How did the C64 version stack up against these two? I'm guessing it was the best 8-bit version?
More like the BBC version. The best 8 bit versions are the unofficial Plus 4 and C128 versions. They are the fastest two. The C64 certainly has the potential to make a faster version of elite than the BBC/Spectrum as it's a much faster machine but it wasn't fully utilised.
The C64 was terrible for 3d. Checkout starglider (ok, awful conversion) or driller. I think only mercenary managed to pull off a decent frame rate. The CPU was simply too slow.
BBC version wins all the time, the FPS is perfect while other computers are sluggish
I thought that there was a double buffered (no flicker) version for the Master, but can only find this bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2088 which is really quite hard as the AI "thinks" and acts faster! It probably has the enhanced AI, I'm not good enough to know.
...and still both versions are better than Elite Dangerous.
(yes, bitter and twisted ED kickstarter, DDF member here)
Just wondering how the spectrum version would run at 7 MHz.
Have you tried it yet? I loaded the 128 TAP into an emulator (Fuse) and ran it at 200% (about 7MHz). At double speed it works well. Much above that and it gets too difficult to control.
Beware the ZX Spectrum’s Python Parade!
Nice review. I grew up with Elite on ZX Spectrum, judging from your video BBC version is just too easy, throwing money at you and with dumb opponents.
What irritates me, is also the planet/station flickering on BBC and the planets looking everything else just not as planets.
Also this makes me proud, because as a kid I reached status Dangerous in the Spectrum version.
For me (very biased) Elite on ZX Spectrum is the winner ;-)
***** I think Acornsoft must have revised the AI for post-Beeb versions. Watching the vid, enemies on my Electron version were more like what this vid showed the Specrum's version as having. No flickering though, pretty sure that's just the emulator.
Agree about the planets looking odd with their fast spinning, hence I'm glad the Electron didn't have that. You're wrong about the money though, the Beeb version is just showing the pilot's total cash, not the per-ship award.
Going to uni interupted my playing the Electron version, was probably close to Elite, but still Deadly by the time studies took over. In the meantime though, I reached Deadly on my friend's C64 aswell (though we lived 400 miles apart, so I couldn't play both).
Drew's right about the Spectrum's AI, missions & immersion (think the C64 version had some of these touches too), but if the emulated frame rate is accurate I think that would drive me crazy. :D
Overall though, before watching this vid, I hadn't realised the versions differed so much. Very interesting!
Btw, the music on the C64 version is absolutely brilliant, likewise the Energy Bomb effect was the best of any version IMO. While playing though, I did miss the Electron's instant-docking side effect of the simplified docking computer, sooo useful for getting out of sticky situations.
Great review but I'd have to disagree. The ZX Spectrum version is even better than Elite: Dangerous! There. I said it!! lol
моя любимая игра была )) love game !!!
BBC version looks much the same as the C64 version?
Unfortunately Elite Dangerous probably wins overall. ;)
Comparing a game from 1984 to one from 2014... lol. After all those years I HOPE it'd win out in graphics and features, lol.
Don't worry...it still takes "5 minutes" to travel from a star to the average station so there is that
🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Yeah, even though I was a 'Speccy' - the BEEB version was the best.
It just played better, the sound effects were (of course) better and it generated better atmosphere. The Speecy version was decent but seemed like a lazy port to me when it was finally released.
When it arrived on the Amiga it was pretty good but again, nowhere near as good as it should have been.
Agreed. Being a former BBC Elite gamer, when the Amiga version came out I was really disappointed. A small letterbox screen with solid vector but SLOW graphics. Would have much preferred they stuck with wireframe but made it lighting fast/smooth plus a far bigger screen/field of view. Obviously too quick to go solid 3D route at the expense of sacrificing gameplay.
couple of other points.
The combat on the BBC was easier, but the Vipers were very dangerous. You didn't risk an offender rating if you could help it. On the spectrum they were much less fearsome.
The animation was jumpy and inaccurate on the spectrum at short range. Docking at slow speed was impossible because the slot darted around randomly.
Detecting laser hits was dodgy. You showed yourself an experienced spectrum player by concentrating your fire on the rear of the Python - hits on the nose did nothing.