BBC Micro cassette Elite

About

This repository contains the cassette version of Ian Bell and David Braben's 1984 Acornsoft source code for Elite on the BBC Micro — described as literally the original source, just reformatted and documented line-by-line by Mark Moxon rather than reconstructed from a disassembly. It supports building three variants — a Stairway to Hell tape archive build, the original source-disc build, and a text-sources build — that reproduce the released binaries byte-for-byte.

How it differs from the original

A flicker-free branch backports the BBC Master's flicker-free ship-drawing routines into the cassette version, and an Elite Compendium branch bundles in further hacks — neither exists in the original cassette release.

Getting started

Building requires BeebAsm and Python; the project's build script produces a disc image by default, or a UEF tape image with additional options, either of which can be loaded on real BBC Micro hardware or in an emulator.

History

The project builds on Kieran Connell's BeebAsm version of Elite and Paul Brink's earlier disassembly, reconstructed from cassette source archives originally published on Ian Bell's personal website.

Additional notes

Quirk

The author found a discrepancy between two versions of the original ELITEB source program that determines whether the default starting commander has a rear laser, suggesting the released game and its source disc weren't perfectly in sync.