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Subject: Re: Palm OS Elite In article <1068776880.39711.0@demeter.uk.clara.net>, John Constable wrote: Does anyone know what's going on as everyone seems to be avoiding saying anything on the net? Palm Elite was the beginning of the end for Elite: The New Kind (I believe Palm Elite was a TNK port to PalmOS). The porter of Palm Elite tried to ask David Braben for permission to distribute it. The Breadbin said no. Ian Bell fanned the flames with a 'Win Palm Elite' contest on his website, with lots of obvious denigrating comments about his erstwhile friend. Not long after, someone else ported TNK to, I think, the PocketPC platform and foolishly included an EULA. At this point, David Braben finally said something about TNK - he told Christian Pinder to take Elite: TNK down. In turn, Christian Pinder asked anyone who had a TNK derivative to take it down. Early on, it looked like attempts were being made to make an official shareware version of TNK. However, this was doomed to fail as the Braben and Ian Bell don't talk to each other, and it seems like a fight broke out between Pinder and Braben, and a deadlock occurred that hasn't been resolved to date. In fact, it looks like Christian Pinder has lost all interest in anything to do with Elite now, including his own Darkness Fall project (although he possibly just ran out of time - it happens). So it's unlikely in the extreme there will ever be a shareware version. In fact, it's simply not possible to get a legal copy of 'classic' Elite, and it never will be simply because Bell and Braben won't talk to each other and agree a sane way of distributing it. Elite is essentially lost forever - well, at least legal versions. Without going into a discourse about 'information wants to be free' (which it doesn't; information doesn't *want* anything - it's just a basic property of information is that if you put it in a machine that can copy it, it will be copied and will propagate), the TNK sources are still out there, although you have to look a bit harder. Since no one will touch TNK officially with a barge pole, you'll also have to port it yourself if you want it on your Palm. Good luck. Or you can find a PalmOS Spectrum emulator if such a beast exists and play the Spectrum version. (Or BBC, or C64 etc. but the Spectrum is probably the easiest machine to emulate by a Palm) It looks like David Braben is once again turning a blind eye to the odd copies of TNK that are still out there as well. Braben came out of all the takedown TNK stuff early this year looking like the bad guy, but in reality, everyone involved pretty much got covered in muck over the affair, and the only losers were the community itself. The short answer is of course - there will never be a Palm Elite. At least not officially. Officially, Elite is dead. Dylan Smith |