Long and Fraught

It has been a long and frightfully fraught day, tomorrow can only get better... We're off out to sort out a new mortgage for a house we're buying... which will be fun.

But, for entertainment this evening, I've left off with my World of Tanks kicker, and I've played a couple of rounds of war thunder... I'm not sold on the whole plane upgrades thing (yet) but I'm so happy to see the oft remarked about broken economy get a fix.

And as ever even on my terrible 260 GTX graphics card on this machine that game looks gorgeous.

However, its not as gorgeous as the other game I've been playing this week...

No folks, don't adjust your sets, that is the graphics, this is actually the best graphics you'll ever likely see in this particular game, for this is Elite II Frontier - the best game ever - but this is amazingly the Atari ST version, decompiled and then stripped of ST hardware called and then converted to using OpenGL on the PC to render... an amazing piece of programming which I can barely get my head around - despite having downloaded the code and had a look - and also an amazing way to re-enjoy this most classic of games.

Not a lot of people know this, but I was so taken with this game that I tried to start a club around it, long before the internet, and before BBS's were buzzing about this game I send a missive off to the late great ST Format and said I'm here talk to me as the Frontier Club.  My parents went mental about this when my little brother showed them in the magazine.

They thought I would need a license or pay tax on whatever I had, so they made me turn it into a free users group, which promptly flopped.

But for a short time I made my first ever bit of cash from these computers, and that little bit of cash I made was turned into a few news letters, envelopes and stamps to mail people their disks back and forth, I had five regular commentators, and for their £5 each "member" of the original list got a couple of news letters, planned to be quarterly, they got some fan fiction, and the exchange of saved games from other players in the club.

My parents killed it tho, my little brother also, to this day - despite my working as a software engineer - they don't seem to realise how much they held me back when I was at the forefront of something popular and amazing, and making money...