Indeed, my first response was: "That's not possible". The second was: Let's take it apart and see how it works. That was something Braben and Bell had foreseen, Elite was very hard to reverse engineer, layer upon layer of tricks to stop you from getting to what actually ran. Very impressive stuff.
The whole idea that someone can make the computer that you think you know absolutely inside-out do stuff in real time that you'd have trouble doing at all no matter how much time you've got is what made it so intriguing.
One of the more interesting moments in trying to crack the copy protection that stopped you from seeing the naked assembly in the loader is that at some point the game code contains the string 'does your mother know that you are doing this?' or something to that effect. That was more effective than the last 10 hours or so of decryption stepping through the code in Exmon because I realized I was utterly outclassed...
Indeed, my first response was: "That's not possible". The second was: Let's take it apart and see how it works. That was something Braben and Bell had foreseen, Elite was very hard to reverse engineer, layer upon layer of tricks to stop you from getting to what actually ran. Very impressive stuff.
The whole idea that someone can make the computer that you think you know absolutely inside-out do stuff in real time that you'd have trouble doing at all no matter how much time you've got is what made it so intriguing.
One of the more interesting moments in trying to crack the copy protection that stopped you from seeing the naked assembly in the loader is that at some point the game code contains the string 'does your mother know that you are doing this?' or something to that effect. That was more effective than the last 10 hours or so of decryption stepping through the code in Exmon because I realized I was utterly outclassed...