This page is a draft.
  1. Elite
  2. Frontier
  3. FFE

Elite

Frontier

Frontier: Elite 2 is the sequel to Elite. This was the first game I played in the series.

A decompiled-translated-recompiled GL port of frontier exists that runs on modern machines (Windows and Linux):

FFE

Frontier: First Encounters (unofficially known as Elite 3) is the sequel to Frontier. There are a number of source hacks and derivations of this game:

JJFFE

The "hub" port from the family of hacks out there. A mostly faithful, stable, cross-platform engine for the game.

Jukka's mod

Referenced in Anisotropic's readme. It's unclear what was added in this mod.

Anisotropic's mod

A fairly popular mod that tried to fix some of the obviously stupid things in the game (ships with negative cargo capacities, etc.) but also made more wide-ranging and controversial game play changes.

From Nic's mod readme:

Ansio's mod adds a lot to JJFFE, but also makes it too unstable. I tried stabilising it (I stopped some stack corruption, fixed going to Pleione and other crashes), but there are too many issues. So my plan is to slowly move changes from Aniso's mod to this mod but allow them to all be configurable through "hacks.txt".

GLFFE

A GL-based high-resolution engine for FFE. There are precompiled versions for Windows floating around, as well as the source. I've not managed to build it anywhere, yet.

Nic's Mod

Windows binaries and some source. Bug fixes.

Anton Lindstrom's hi-res hack

Original website has disappeared. Source recoverable via Internet Archive.

This patch doubled the effective resolution of the game's software renderer.

I've managed to apply this patch on top of a recent JJFFE source and build on Linux.

Soholian Fever

At the start of the game, there are a number of scripted situations that you can get involved in. Two in particular are a race to a nearby system, Alioth, and a virus outbreak in another, Soholia. Ferrying medical supplies to Soholia can net you a huge profit, but there is a limited amount of time before the outbreak is contained. George Hooper put together an excellent getting started PDF which explains how to (attempt to) maximize your profit in this window, with the help of a few game bugs. JJFFE fixes one of these, but despite that my record for a Soholia run (including the Wiccan Ware race) is £727,800.

misc