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by qingcharles 129 days ago
Me too. I'm going to be reverse-engineering Elite PC (original version) and I can't help but think the source is lost. The developer seems to have totally dropped off the face of the Earth. I've contacted others who might know and nobody knows where they are.

Even the game I was a developer on which was published by Eidos in ~1998 is probably lost source. I can't think that anyone has the Visual Source Safe database backup CDs lying around, but I could be wrong.
1 comments
lstodd 129 days ago
You mean 1991 Elite Plus? The whole series has been reverse-engineered to death and back. Maybe you mean some other game?

Anyway, for those old titles I don't think not having source is that much of a problem. I participated in two reimplementations of 1994 XCOM : UFO2000 and OpenXcom, helped the 1oom project (first Master of Orion) and I don't think having original source would have helped much.

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qingcharles 129 days ago
No, I'm doing the original 1987 PC Elite. The later one was written by Chris Sawyer. I asked him recently and he also has no idea about Andy who wrote the prior version (both for Realtime). [both versions I assume were written in 100% ASM] Surprisingly Gemini seems to be pretty good at writing 8088 CGA assembler, especially in Deep Think mode. It one-shot an entire filled poly renderer and 3D engine.

I worked with some of the original XCOM guys after a bunch of them left Microprose to set up on their own. I wrote a lot of the graphics engine for this, which was really a direct descendent of XCOM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOYps_3eM0

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