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| Braben, Elite, and Raspberry Pi | Jul 07, 2011 5:41 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:If you look closely on the left side of the screen Mother is showing Selenis on page 7 of this episode, you'll see what I meant to be a sort of 3D schematic of the Hertzsprung star system in which this Andiran Robotics space station is located; vertical bars off of the horizontal plane are used to represent distance above or below the ecliptic (or perhaps rather the system's invariable plane, which is something I just learned about in making sure I was using "ecliptic" properly--I wasn't *quite*).
Ooh! Here's a nifty photo taken by NASA's 1994 lunar probe Clementine (a craft I have mentioned before), showing--from right to left--the Moon, the Sun, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury roughly in a row near the Earth's ecliptic plane and our system's invariable plane:
image by NASA (source)
Anyway, I got the idea for those vertical bars in the system schematic from an old space sim I played on my family's Commodore 64 computer as a tad: Elite, which was at the time (1984) an amazing 3D (!) simulator of interstellar trade, where you flew a space ship between star systems, buying and selling for profit--and in between you had to fight off pirates, maybe the police if you were naughty, and the rare alien invasion. In a way this single 5 and a quarter-inch floppy affair was a very bare-bones game, but the real draw was just how open-ended it was: you could go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy as long as you had the patience, and you could do whatever you wanted as long as you could survive the consequences.
Elite was made by David Braben and Ian Bell, and part of the reason why I bring all this up is that I recently stumbled across a BBC video of a recent Braben project: Raspberry Pi, an entire tiny computer--about the size of a USB thumbdrive--that Braben says will cost about $25 per unit, enough to be given to every kid in school. Here is the video of him showing it off and talking about it (WARNING: video on the following page auto-plays with sound): viola.
I was interested not only in seeing what he looks and sounds like, but also how enthusiastic an advocate he is of teaching kids the basics of computer programming, which he points out really isn't done at all anymore (what, they don't make kids learn Logo (I think that's what it was...at the time we just called it "Turtle") in school anymore? lucky punks :P); non-UK viewers such as myself may like to know that the "ICT" he mentions as being taught instead of programming is Information and Communication Technology, a subject in the UK's national curriculum that teaches the use of office suites and desktop publishing software, apparently; Braben blames ICT for ousting computer programming as a subject and causing what he says was a 50% decline in computer science majors in the early 2000's.
As you can see from his Raspberry Pi prototype, Braben loves to make impressive computing in tiny packages. "Elite" was written in machine code, which was important because it gave them more options on their development machine, which had just 14 KB of memory. Ah, and according to the Wikipedia article, the 3D radar display I stole for that A* page was the last thing they added, to take up the last few unused bytes. And I hadn't known this before, but machine code is writing in the computer's actual 1's and 0's (or whatever), as opposed to an assembly language, which "uses mnemonic codes to refer to machine code instructions"--I had always thought assembly was the 1's and 0's, but now I know better!
Speaking of assembly, though, that's what Braben used for writing the first Elite sequel, 1993's (yes it was a long wait) Frontier: Elite II. I played Frontier on the Amiga, which happened to be its native format (good choice, David! :), and if I had thought the original Elite was impressive in fitting I don't know how many star systems--although their space stations pretty much all looked alike, and played a charming version of Strauss' The Blue Danube for you as you spun into port thanks to your nifty docking computer--onto a single 5.25" floppy, Frontier blew that away by fitting what I am still convinced is an entire procedurally generated galaxy--which you could pan across and rotate in 3D, if you felt like it and had the patience to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling...--onto its single 3.5" disk; not only that, but systems had different planets, and you could even land on them (I recall this being hard)! And sit there at the spaceport watching the other planets and sun(s) revolve overhead. Pretty amazing.
The Wikipedia article says the simulation of physics was so thorough that you could even execute gravitational slingshot maneuvers around planets and stars! Well, I never intentionally tried that, I don't think; mostly I remember slingshotting back and forth in really awkward space battles, because somehow while flying toward a planet you'd get "intercepted" by some dang pirate moving at a completely different speed, and even though he wasn't matching your speed at all, you still had to get rid of him before you could speed time back up to get to the planet before mom called you up for dinner, so the two of you would just end up making long passes back and forth, like really clumsy jousters, until finally you got a few hits in in a row on a pass and took him out. Bleh! Having utterly realistic physics in a space sim *sounds* cool, but it also shows that dogfighting in space isn't really feasible, which is why WWII flight sims will always be the best. :P (The original Elite had an easy, very non-realistic flight model.)
You can, by the way, download the original "Elite" in a plethora of old computer formats from Ian Bell's web site.
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