Dock your Cobra Mark III in London – 21st November

If you’ve ever played Elite – which is probably almost everyone in the Acorn and RISC OS spheres1 – you’ll probably find the next RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting an interesting one, with Mark Moxon visiting the group as the guest speaker.

Mark, who was once editor of RISC User and later Acorn user, has spent some time with the game, exploring its code and documenting it, and has even added enhancements, such as flicker free drawing. He has also done similar with Aviator and Revs.

He will be giving a talk at the ROUGOL meeting entitled Right On Commander, in which he will be talking about how and why he set about doing all this, and showing off some of what he has achieved, such as the Elite Universe Editor, which allows you to set up scenarios within the game. You can position asteroids, ships, and missiles around your own, set their speed and direction, the AI model they use, and then play it out. To illustrate this in action, Mark modelled a scenario on the screenshot found on the back of the original box for the game, and set it playing. Other examples found on the Elite Universe Editor page include a recreation of the box art, and screenshots from the manual.

Not content with that, he’s also managed to get the game running entirely in teletext mode – and you may even be able to play it that way at the meeting!

As well as looking at the games, Mark can be expected to also talk about his time working at Acorn User, and his long history with Acorn computers.

The meeting will take place on Monday, 21st November, with Mark’s talk beginning at 7:45pm – but note that this month it will be an in-person meeting only; there is no option to join in online. If you want the chance to be one of the first explore the Universe in MODE 7 Cobra Mark III, therefore, you’ll need to head to:

The Duke of Sussex pub,
23 Bayliss Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.

There are directions on the ROUGOL website to help get you there whatever your mode of transport, and once there head upstairs, to the Chichester Room (or possibly the Petworth Room), where you should find ROUGOL members lurking from around 6:30pm onwards.

!ReadMe

  1. Except me.

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