Thank you, that's a good point. The site started off with just the BBC Micro version, and I never expanded the book references to be clearer. Anyway, I have reworded every reference to books in the commentary so they…
Glad you like it! I’ve been working on this for nearly five years, along with my other software archaeology projects - I started in May 2020, back in lockdown. It’s a true labour of love. Here’s a timeline of the…
Thank you! I came at it from the BBC Micro angle, which was the system I grew up with, and I have to say that analysing Elite been a brilliant way to learn about other 8-bit platforms. I’ve documented the NES version…
I keep a list of everything that isn’t 100% clear in my commentary, here: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/to-do_list.html This is not a big list, and these are all pretty subtle aspects of the game. After 4 years…
Well, exactly. This project is a hobby, and I’d like to try to keep it as my happy place! Besides, I’ve published PDFs of my travel writing sites, and the thought of trying to keep a code repository, a website and a PDF…
This should answer your question: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/about_this_project.htm... Some parts of Elite were documented prior to my project, particularly the procedural generation and ship data blocks. But…
Oolite is normally quoted at this point. I think it's in Objective C? But exactly how much it relates to the original game's code, I don't know. https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite
The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work. You can use a search engine to find it.
Yup. "Never fly without a rebuy", as they say!
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Check 3 only looks to see if we are moving backwards into the station slot. This is a bit pointless to calculate as falling backwards would mean that a number of the other checks…
I love the BASIC assembler on the BBC Micro and Archimedes. It is a work of art. Incidentally, the fully buildable Lander source code in the website's accompanying git repository is also in BBC BASIC format - as an…
I've always felt that calling Lander a "demo" was harsh. It's a fully featured game in itself, and has features that Zarch doesn't (such as falling rocks and hover mode). Yes, Zarch was the result of continued…
That's a good point - I wondered what the correct term was, and Fourier synthesis makes a lot more sense! I will update the article accordingly; thank you for pointing that out.
Yeah, I’ve had to add the same disclaimer to all my analyses of old code (e.g. Elite, Revs, Aviator). I’m not sure there’s any other solution - the original copyright owners still hold the copyright, and that’s just how…
In terms of scale, there is the concept of the tile size, which is set to 0x01000000, and everything uses the same coordinate units, so it’s possible to extrapolate this to give some sense of scale. You can see the…
It is indeed different on PAL vs NTSC. The code relies on the NMI being called at 50Hz - as a result a number of timings are wrong on the NTSC version, so the music is too fast, the combat demo auto-play doesn't work…
A shout-out is definitely due to Ian Bell and his website. This is where you can find the original source code for the BBC Micro version. Those original disks form the basis for all my Elite commentaries, including the…
The quote is: My greatest published achievements technically would have to be fitting BBC Cassette "Elite" into 32K of RAM including the screen, and later the Nintendo Entertainment System conversion of "Elite" that…
Indeed - "slaves" got changed to "robot slaves", while "narcotics" became "rare species" and "liquor/wines" became "beverages". You can still trade firearms, though, so its not entirely squeaky clean...
Alas, the NTSC version doesn't actually work on NTSC consoles. The NMI timings have been changed to work with some (but not all) emulators in NTSC mode, but it isn't a full NTSC conversion, it's an NTSC emulation (at…
Also, the JMP BEGIN approach will still work even if you move the BEGIN routine elsewhere in bank 7, so presumably it's done this way so things won't break during development when you're still trying to work out which…
There are no ads or trackers on my site, so it can’t be that - it is just the page content and some JavaScript, nothing more. I suspect it’s because I’m using an old off-the-shelf script for the navigation, and the size…
I agree, I think Elite was the first commercial example of a split-screen mode on the BBC. It does flicker a bit at the switchover point when the disk is being accessed, as it is interrupt-based, but it's not too bad.…
Author here, sorry to hear that. The side menu is quite large so there is a bit of a delay on loading - the project has grown pretty big, and so has the nav! It works OK on my ancient iPhone 6, so it shouldn't really be…
Absolutely this - I’ve tried to explain things clearly in the commentary, not least so I can understand them again when I revisit bits of the code. I’ve got about 15 new deep dives that I'm going to be writing next, now…
Thank you, that's a good point. The site started off with just the BBC Micro version, and I never expanded the book references to be clearer. Anyway, I have reworded every reference to books in the commentary so they…
Glad you like it! I’ve been working on this for nearly five years, along with my other software archaeology projects - I started in May 2020, back in lockdown. It’s a true labour of love. Here’s a timeline of the…
Thank you! I came at it from the BBC Micro angle, which was the system I grew up with, and I have to say that analysing Elite been a brilliant way to learn about other 8-bit platforms. I’ve documented the NES version…
I keep a list of everything that isn’t 100% clear in my commentary, here: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/to-do_list.html This is not a big list, and these are all pretty subtle aspects of the game. After 4 years…
Well, exactly. This project is a hobby, and I’d like to try to keep it as my happy place! Besides, I’ve published PDFs of my travel writing sites, and the thought of trying to keep a code repository, a website and a PDF…
This should answer your question: https://elite.bbcelite.com/about_site/about_this_project.htm... Some parts of Elite were documented prior to my project, particularly the procedural generation and ship data blocks. But…
Oolite is normally quoted at this point. I think it's in Objective C? But exactly how much it relates to the original game's code, I don't know. https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite
The original Elite was reverse-engineered into C by Christian Pinder as part of the Elite: The New Kind project. The source is out there. It's a brilliant bit of work. You can use a search engine to find it.
Yup. "Never fly without a rebuy", as they say!
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Check 3 only looks to see if we are moving backwards into the station slot. This is a bit pointless to calculate as falling backwards would mean that a number of the other checks…
I love the BASIC assembler on the BBC Micro and Archimedes. It is a work of art. Incidentally, the fully buildable Lander source code in the website's accompanying git repository is also in BBC BASIC format - as an…
I've always felt that calling Lander a "demo" was harsh. It's a fully featured game in itself, and has features that Zarch doesn't (such as falling rocks and hover mode). Yes, Zarch was the result of continued…
That's a good point - I wondered what the correct term was, and Fourier synthesis makes a lot more sense! I will update the article accordingly; thank you for pointing that out.
Yeah, I’ve had to add the same disclaimer to all my analyses of old code (e.g. Elite, Revs, Aviator). I’m not sure there’s any other solution - the original copyright owners still hold the copyright, and that’s just how…
In terms of scale, there is the concept of the tile size, which is set to 0x01000000, and everything uses the same coordinate units, so it’s possible to extrapolate this to give some sense of scale. You can see the…
It is indeed different on PAL vs NTSC. The code relies on the NMI being called at 50Hz - as a result a number of timings are wrong on the NTSC version, so the music is too fast, the combat demo auto-play doesn't work…
A shout-out is definitely due to Ian Bell and his website. This is where you can find the original source code for the BBC Micro version. Those original disks form the basis for all my Elite commentaries, including the…
The quote is: My greatest published achievements technically would have to be fitting BBC Cassette "Elite" into 32K of RAM including the screen, and later the Nintendo Entertainment System conversion of "Elite" that…
Indeed - "slaves" got changed to "robot slaves", while "narcotics" became "rare species" and "liquor/wines" became "beverages". You can still trade firearms, though, so its not entirely squeaky clean...
Alas, the NTSC version doesn't actually work on NTSC consoles. The NMI timings have been changed to work with some (but not all) emulators in NTSC mode, but it isn't a full NTSC conversion, it's an NTSC emulation (at…
Also, the JMP BEGIN approach will still work even if you move the BEGIN routine elsewhere in bank 7, so presumably it's done this way so things won't break during development when you're still trying to work out which…
There are no ads or trackers on my site, so it can’t be that - it is just the page content and some JavaScript, nothing more. I suspect it’s because I’m using an old off-the-shelf script for the navigation, and the size…
I agree, I think Elite was the first commercial example of a split-screen mode on the BBC. It does flicker a bit at the switchover point when the disk is being accessed, as it is interrupt-based, but it's not too bad.…
Author here, sorry to hear that. The side menu is quite large so there is a bit of a delay on loading - the project has grown pretty big, and so has the nav! It works OK on my ancient iPhone 6, so it shouldn't really be…
Absolutely this - I’ve tried to explain things clearly in the commentary, not least so I can understand them again when I revisit bits of the code. I’ve got about 15 new deep dives that I'm going to be writing next, now…