Alexander the ok
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2025
1:02:03 · 2M views · Nov 30, 2023
An hour-long video essay on Elite, the 1984 BBC Micro game by David Braben and Ian Bell. It covers how they fit a 3D engine, economy and universe into 22KB on a 2MHz 6502.
HN commenters recommend it as an amazing overview of the technical feats and history behind Elite, and cite it for what the 6502 could do.
3 comments from Hacker News
Alexander the Ok, on youtube, has an amazing video on this. It is not quite as technical as the webiste for obvious reasons, but great overview and historical facts as well. this video
Reposting an old comment[1] which may be of interest to Oolite players: > Elite: "The game that couldn't be written" > An hour long video essay about the classic game Elite, the BBC Micro, and how Elite was able to deliver an open-world 3D experience in the 1980s. The creator is "Alexander the ok." this video [1] [LINK]
We were talking about "the 70s and 80s", not 01959. My point about APT is that a "beefy machine" in 01959 was the embedded controller in your keyboard by 01983; it wasn't a beefy machine any more. The PDP-8 was indeed pretty common for CNC control in the late 01960s, and it could run about 333000 12-bit instructions per second, which is about half as fast as the original IBM PC. So, yeah, a machine like that was exactly a home PC by the mid-80s. For real-time control of the 3-D printer, you can get by with less. There were three big problems for manipulating 3-D models for home hobbyists in the 70s and 80s. One was computational speed: for games, you need to render the 3-D graphics fast enough to provide an illusion of immersion, and with a few hundred thousand instructions per second (and no multiplier) you were limited to a handful of polygons. Like, typically about 20. See the Apple ][ FS1 flight simulator this video , the 01983 Star wars arcade game (at 2:02), Battlezone (2:14), and Ian Bell and David Braban's Elite from 01984, which was successfully ported from the 2MHz 6502 in the BBC Micro (2:53, but also most of the rest of the hour of the video) to the Z80-based ZX Spectrum (3.5MHz but noticeably slower than the 6502; see [LINK] ). For producing G-code, though, you don't need to be able to handle all the 3-D geometry in 50 milliseconds. You just need to be able to handle it overnight. That's a million times longer, so you can do a million times as much computation on th