Miscellaneous

Frontier: First Encounters - Adverts

These are scans of both sides of an advertising sheet for the US version of First Encounters, prior to its release in 1995

Elite & Frontier - Games

This is a photo of all the Elite and Frontier games I have managed to get my hands on over the years. There are some pretty obscure versions of Elite in there, click the picture for a bigger view, or click here to see the bigger picture with each version identified

For years I believed that Frontier First Encounters was only released in three languages - English, French & German. Until, that is, I came across an Italian version of the game, with the printed material also produced in that language.
Click the picture for a much bigger version...

Astronomy - Greenwich Meridian

This is obviously my pride and joy; a personalised certificate from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, confirming my presence on the Prime Meridian at the time and date specified. All this for a mere £1

Astronomy - Lunar Reconnaissance Mission

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will launch in late 2008 on a 1-year mission to the Moon. Its objective is to survey the lunar surface and pick out suitable landing sites plus potential local resources.
Until July 31st 2008 NASA offered the chance for people to have their name collected and carried on board the orbiter. The link to this facility is here

Tatung Einstein home computer

Thanks to the numerous emulators available today, it is possible to play every version of Elite on a modern PC - except one. The Tatung Einstein home computer had a good version of Elite written for it by Merlin Software but the only Einstein emulator currently available crashes when it tries to run the game, apparently due to the copy protection on the disc.
Finding this quite annoying, I got hold of an Einstein on eBay purely to run the game. At the moment the only way I can find to get screenshots is to photograph the monitor - which gives poor quality results - but I'm going to figure out a way of improving this.