This is a computer game called Elite. This is really Well elite
[I'll] show you in a minute where we load it up, but this is elite was the first
Really proper game to use three-dimensional graphics this current generation of gamers won't
Remember a time when games weren't 3D so before that time we had sort of games like like this
which is sort of this is the [version] of Pac-man for the BBC and
This is this comes on tape of course for the this
Computer when the game came out which was in 3D
Actually just blew everybody away. [I] mean the guys who wrote this in my view geniuses
[I] mean they they wrote it belem braben they wrote this while they were undergraduates at Cambridge
and they were probably no [more] than 20 years old when they wrote this and
They made the computer they made this computer do something which nobody thought it would could possibly do
The program they wrote was just a work of genius how they managed to get this phenomenal
Level of Graphics onto this computer so you can see this is a load it up shortly
But it's all wireframe of course not colored in. It's not shaded and lighter and lit properly, but this was this was [revolutionary] for the
1984 I think it was at the time
I really became slightly obsessed by this game much of me
And I played it and played it and played it with my mate Pete Siddaway
Who was my friend at school and we played this thing from ages and ages and ages?
It's actually one of the first not only one of [the] first 3D games invented. It's one of the most
Open-ended games
So there's no point to the game you can either you can decide whether you want to so there's no levels
There's no lives involved so computer games like this one just
Previously you had you had three lives if the monsters got you you died
And you moved on to the next life and the game the idea was to keep
Going through the levels and amassing as many points as you could this game is completely unlike that. There's no levels
You just start off with a spaceship and you can explore the Galaxy wherever you want to go so this computer?
This is it when you bought it
It came with it didn't come with a disk drive or anything what you did is you attached a tape recorder to it?
This is the tape for Elite
this isn't the original tape recorder we had for it that one broke after many years of use so this is a
Tape recorder we had lying around the house, so the first thing I've got to do is rewind the tape
What I'll do is. I'll pull the plug out to start with so you can hear the data
Because this is the great thing about this is you can actually hear [the] ones and zeros that coming out of this
This is the leader
so this is a very evocative noise from my childhood, so
[what] you're hearing there is ones and [zeros] which had been recorded onto the tape and it
Literally it stores one as one frequency of noise and a zero as a different frequency
[and] it's just oscillating between those two different frequencies noise frequencies play
So I'll stop that and I'll have to rewind it again [there], and then we wait. Oh, no
[I] don't rewind it far enough
So none of this instant put a disc in a computer or boot it off a hard drive
You have to wait you had to be patient
So now it's confused because it's it's loaded part of the data, and I've told it to rewind there we go
So it's found it notice
All these ones and zeros all this noise is being going into the computer and being translated now into Data the first time I
Played this again was probably first time in about 20 years that I played it again
and I got it down from the loft my parents loft and set it all up and I actually let my kids play it and
so I've got a
[five-Year-old] daughter who really really loved playing it. She wasn't very good at it
So now we have to wait about [two] two or three minutes before it loads
Right so the first thing you see this this is just blew me away the first time I saw her
I thought this is absolutely fantastic
You got a rotating wireframe graphics
Spaceship on the screen and this was just incredible we're moving from Pac-man to this was absolutely wonderful
Right, so we've got a cargo
Now we want somewhere to go so we go to this local chart here. We'll use our arrow
Let's go to Rio
Center the cross on there, and we can look up data on system
So we can look at what the planets like I still admit to being slightly obsessed by this game
But no the other reason is that the way that they put this data into the program
So this was you've only got thirty two k of data to play with
So they've created with this 32k. You've got a whole galactic chart, so these are full, but this is a
Galaxy of Star systems each with its own population each with its populate
different aliens populating a planet and and different
Levels of [technology] and so on and there's eight such galaxies there's absolutely no way you can just store all this information in
32k this is all generated randomly generated with a [so] [called] random number generator and that random number generator
they can use to spit out whether the
the planet is populated by cats or by humans or whether it is populated by
Whether the technology is high-tech or the rings fill in the [stone] [age] each one of these red buttons does something each one of these?
Function keys does something I've lost the original bar that came with the game, so I'm now going to press this button
Which [is] going to launch into space?
So there we are we're presented now with the planet in front of us as a planet laughs in front of us
So this this diagram here this tells us. What's around us so as I move through I move through space
Let's increase our speed. This is our speed dialer gauge up down here [rotates]. I'm pulling up the spaceship now
And rotating back. There's this there's our space station
What's that? Oh?
It's [a] python
Okay, all right, so it's firing at us now
Because I've upset in life. Oh, oh
That wiped out the front shields its launch another missile. I don't think we're going to have we around very much longer
But so there goes our cargo spinning off into space
But after a while, I became more interested in
figuring out how it worked and
I became eventually became completely obsessed with how it worked
I
Programmed as well. I call it game. There's not much to do with it
With solid graphics, so this is wireframe graphics
But now I should have been probably studying for my gcSes stroke a-levels. I was spent more time
Writing this than I was doing studying
which augments cause b to flunk my a-levels actually the next generation computer had more processing power and
Was able to not only do wireframe graphics, but it could do
Graphics where you can shade in the faces as well?
So I've actually ported my game to the PC
so I don't
I've taken the original code and put it on my laptop
actually now so I can show you if you if you want to if you're interested in
Seeing this so this is so this is more modern yes, so this is running about [a] thousand times faster than that computer
But I learned to wait for it to boot up now, remember even though he's coming out from sleep
I can't have switch it on I started programming. It's probably when I was about. I was just turned 17
I [think] it was and I still tinker with it now when I
Originally wrote this game. It was the time when you were a guy in the bedroom with a computer
You could like the guys who wrote [elite] you could make an awful lot [of] money out?
Of one person or two people writing a computer game and selling it
so this is my dream right I was going to sell I was going to write my my own computer game and
Sell it on, but I was I was a bit too late really by the time
I sort of got anywhere in my game. It was be getting into the area where
Teams of programmers were required to write games now of course
You know there's practically movie studios or create your own needed to write computer games, originally. I wrote it in
Assembler which is
What the which is what elite is written into in it?
That's the that's the language that the processor understands is [that] each so you write each individual instruction that goes through the processor
So you a very very basic [command] so you can write things like add store subtract
That's pretty much it actually
Shifts are you multiply by two and things like this?
So they're very very basic commands, but once you can build up code
So you have to write an awful lot of it, but you can write routines and things which will
Which will create these fantastic graphics, so originally I wrote [an] assembler. Which was actually for the acorn archimedes at the time
I wasn't writing for the BBC. I was writing an arm assembler
Which is arm is now
the processors you find in
great majority of Mobile Phones around the world
so
Acorn the original company that made the BBC micro and the and the archimedes eventually went bust but not before it spun off this other
Company called Arm which was the company that made the the chip the processor for the acorn archimedes?
And that chip is now used in a tremendous number of mobile phones and mobile
Applications all around the world [so] I wrote an arm assembler, but rapidly became obvious that
To get anywhere with it was it's just too hard to write an arm. Assembly. You can't to make progress faster. I
Had to write in a higher-level language, so eventually I wrote it in C and C has the advantage that you can port it
so it means you can take the code you've written on one machine and
With only a little bit of tweaking if you've written it just right you [can] take that code and [you] can put it on another
Computer and you can compile it for a different computer, so in fact
I took the code that I [wrote] for the archimedes and originally I ported it over to the Mac
and it worked just as happy on the Mac with a bit of tweaking and
Then when I got with my mac ibook, and had a got a PC
I ported over the PC, and I carried on just fiddling with it reads. I call this arena
it's a sort of it sounds a bit like something that it's a nowadays it sounds a bit like a
Something will be on a [gerry] Anderson film but sort of a combination of the word Aura and arena
So like arena is in battle and or is it in something sort of slightly?
Mystical or something like with hindsight is a slightly embarrassing [knife], but I can't change it [now]
It's the same I have to stick with that name. This is your spaceship, so unlike Elite
I've put a an avatar spaceship in so there's there's this. There's the spaceship
So this is essentially what I had on the acorn archimedes. I put in more
graphics over time as the process of the computers have gotten more Modern are able to handle it, [so] [the]
Planet now is got actually you know this is these are the real continents on the planet. [that's] Africa there it mitad [Li]
They're a bit blocky
So Africa coming up that South America look there, there's North America
There's Europe up there, so I you know it mucked around it
And I've also given Earth some rings which she doesn't have so this is something that elite couldn't do is that I?
Can fly backwards in this so it's a paying, newtonian mechanics this means. It's nothing to look at compared with modern computer games because
[yeah], I've written
modern computer games are written with a
Graphics engine in mind. They're either opengl or something like this or
Directx or something like that whereas this one
I've written this is I've written the graphics engine from scratch
So this is my own graphics engine in facts not making use of any hardware acceleration at all
It's just running on the processor
This is I'm quite proud of having to have written my own graphics engine, so I'm a physicist now
I'm employed by the university as a physicist. [I] think basically the writing this this game is not a game by writing this this
bit of graphics here is
Probably one of the biggest reasons [why] I'm doing what I'm doing now and I
Wasn't interested
actually in going into the computer games industry eventually I
Decided that I was more interested in writing the thing than playing it after you're going to the computer games industry
you've got to be really enthusiastic about computer games, and I just I
Couldn't you know couldn't care less really, but what it did do [was] it taught me a certain way [of] [thinking]
I think a certain logical way of thinking so in structured way of thinking especially
the
debugging so-called debugging of the programs is probably
teaches you a lot about
logic and finding your own answers to the [problems]
if you've got a program like this
and it doesn't work you've got [a] got to go through the program and
Find out which bit of the program doesn't work where he made a mistake somewhere
So you've got a very logically go through step [by] [step] and find out whereabouts in the program the program is not [working] or not
working and quite the way you want and
Sometimes all you get when you run a program like like this after you've made a change [is] it just spits out nothing
it just says
Segmentation fault or worse it just crashes the machine entirely and from that from that point
You've got to work out what what the problem is with the program and it teaches you a very logical
Structured way of thinking of course physics is also a very you have to think in a very [logical] way
in terms of coming about an experiment in physics to try and work out what it is working with the
experimental or where the [errors] are with the experiment this kind of thing so
So this is this probably goes a long way to explaining what I am now I?
Have to admit. It's slightly addictive doing this
But it is very difficult I think nowadays
and if you pick up a machine like this, this is a complicated piece of equipment this PC and
to pick it up as a child now and start to do a
Computer program is very very difficult. I mean you're not presented with a
Cursor I
guess in the BBC micro when you can just start typing [you're] presented with this you know mouse and
graphics and all these windows and things and if there's a lot of distractions there you can't just
immediately start typing and your first computer program and so on
There's that you know you've distracted by the internet and all this other stuff
so you've really got a if
You want to start learning to program one of these things you've really got a try you've really got to [know]
you got to download a program like a basic program or C or some compiler like this and
then
Really make an effort to try and start learning programming whereas when you switch on one of these BBC micros is practically natural
I mean you just wait for the first thing. You've got to do is start typing commands into it well
I'm not a gamer at all actually [I'm] not um I don't play computer games at all the only computer game
I'll admit to playing is simcity and I only play that occasionally
but I really not interested in playing computer games and a lot [of] people are but I
Became after elite I became more interested [in] actually writing the thing rather than and how it worked
Which is part of the reason why I never made anything of this they never actually could be bothered to
turn it into a prefer anything more that you could play and shoot shoot things and go and
Do all the wonderful [things] that you can do in elite with what's the future for all reena?
This is probably it I find and less time to do anything with it
These days is sort of probably in the last week. I've done more on it than I've done in the past ten years
that's not supposed to happen [so]
If you've been doing some programming or coding of your own whether it was 20 years ago or 20 minutes ago
We'd love to see it send an email to myself or [Shawn] will I have the email address on the screen
And we'll have a look we love that kind of stuff [and] who knows maybe we'll put something here on computer file
By the way, I'm in Shawn's office. There's no way. I'd have this PC rubbish
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