Elite from Sunrise IDE

Expert (114)

23-03-2015, 20:55

Hi all,

As you've maybe guessed from my Avatar, Elite is one of my favourite games. However, when playing it on a real MSX I still have to use the actual floppy disk. This is slow and after two decades I don't really trust them anymore.

It would also be very convenient if I could use "getdisk" and "start" or "runit" to run it from a SD card in my Sunrise IDE cartrigde, but that doesn't seem to work. The disk appears to contain two files (MSX-DOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM) but in reality they are mere placeholders for the actual game, but it's not entirely a sector based disk game either.

Does anyone know if there is a way or a tool to do this?

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

23-03-2015, 21:53

I have a version that launches directly from the SD card in MSX-DOS 2 with ELITE.COM, ELITE.COD, ELITE.SCR... files. Can't remember where I got it... Send me a PM if you want me to send it to you (I still have to load/save game states from tape though with this version).

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

23-03-2015, 21:57

Diederick, if your disk version is saving / loading game states from disk, I'd be interested by this (trying to mix my file-based version with yours to get a full file-base version including saving / loading game data).

By Manuel

Ascended (19303)

23-03-2015, 22:00

I had a version that ran fine from MSX-DOS. It had the following files: elite.cod, elite.com, elite.dat and elite.scr. I guess you can download it somewhere.

By diederick76

Expert (114)

23-03-2015, 22:01

The save games are somewhere on the disk, probably "inside" one of the files. I'll have to inspect it to find what sectors they are.

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

24-03-2015, 00:08

diederick76 wrote:

The save games are somewhere on the disk, probably "inside" one of the files. I'll have to inspect it to find what sectors they are.

Is there a selection menu for the save-states or is it a single-file ? The tape-version has a "Catalog tape" entry to list the different saves. Anyway, I guess a single-save in an "ELITE.SAV" file would be enough.
Manuel, I have the same files as you in my version.

By Randam

Paragon (1431)

24-03-2015, 07:00

There is a selection menu (10 saves), But perhaps the saves are sector based because you can put in any kind of disk (completely unrelated), try to load a game from it and that will work. The game will give you some equipment based on that.

By Louthrax

Prophet (2436)

24-03-2015, 10:40

I've found the sector-based version. Plan would then be: