Following the penny-drop that Ian Bell's site contains both the bugged and bug-fix versions of Acorn Electron Elite, I have extended my electron-elite-beebasm repository to support the building of both variants; see the repository README for details.
The original Acornsoft version from Ian Bell's site has the bugged galactic hyperdrive. It fails to work because the internal hyperspace counter doesn't get set to a non-zero value, so the countdown never starts.
Interestingly, not only dpes it have the bugged galactic hyperdrive, but it has a different galactic hyperdrive too; if it had worked it would have been triggered by CAPS-LOCK-H instead of CTRL-H, it would have counted down from 5 instead of 15, and it would have dropped you at a random system in the next galaxy, rather than the nearest system to (96, 96) as with all the other versions. It's an interesting variant!
You can see the differences between the variants by searching the source code for _IB_SUPERIOR (for features in the Superior Software variant) or _IB_ACORNSOFT (for features in the Acornsoft variant). Note that the variants I've analysed are the ones from Ian Bell's website; I don't know if these differ from the officially released cassettes.
That's another variant ticked off the list, anyway.
Mark
The original Acornsoft version from Ian Bell's site has the bugged galactic hyperdrive. It fails to work because the internal hyperspace counter doesn't get set to a non-zero value, so the countdown never starts.
Interestingly, not only dpes it have the bugged galactic hyperdrive, but it has a different galactic hyperdrive too; if it had worked it would have been triggered by CAPS-LOCK-H instead of CTRL-H, it would have counted down from 5 instead of 15, and it would have dropped you at a random system in the next galaxy, rather than the nearest system to (96, 96) as with all the other versions. It's an interesting variant!
You can see the differences between the variants by searching the source code for _IB_SUPERIOR (for features in the Superior Software variant) or _IB_ACORNSOFT (for features in the Acornsoft variant). Note that the variants I've analysed are the ones from Ian Bell's website; I don't know if these differ from the officially released cassettes.
That's another variant ticked off the list, anyway.
Mark
Statistics: Posted by MarkMoxon — Fri Mar 22, 2024 4:23 pm