Acorn Electron Elite

ActivePlayableAcorn 32-bit

Based on Elite

About

Elite is Ian Bell and David Braben's game, originally published by Acornsoft in 1984. This repository provides a fully documented, hand-reconstructed disassembly of Elite for the Acorn Electron, annotated line by line as a companion to the elite.bbcelite.com website, and buildable into disc or tape images that run on real Electron hardware or in an emulator. Two variants are supported: the Superior Software release and the original Acornsoft release, which contains the galactic hyperspace bug.

How it differs from the original

Disc images built from this source still only load the game from disc — saving and loading commander files uses cassette, since the underlying game is the cassette version of Electron Elite just loading differently. The build process also omits the original's copy-protection encryption, so the resulting binaries are functionally identical to the originals but don't byte-match the encrypted cassette releases.

Getting started

Building requires BeebAsm and Python, plus the `make` tool (a Windows `make.exe` is included); after pointing the provided Windows batch file or Makefile at your BeebAsm and Python locations, running the build produces a disc image that loads on a real Electron (e.g. via a Gotek drive) or in an emulator. A separate build target produces an authentic UEF cassette tape image, which additionally requires PHP to be installed.

History

The project is a companion to Mark Moxon's elite.bbcelite.com site, reconstructed by hand from a disassembly of the original game binaries, building on Kieran Connell's earlier BeebAsm disassembly of Electron Elite as its original starting point.

Licensing & legal

The repository is released without a license; under default copyright rules, only reading and forking it are permitted.

Additional notes

Variant: An optional 'flicker-free' branch backports BBC Micro features to the Electron version, including flicker-free ship and planet rendering, an escape-capsule animation, an added third size of stardust, and higher-fidelity planet rendering.