Elite-A

ActivePlayableBBC Micro

Based on Elite

About

Elite is the space-trading game for the BBC Micro written by Ian Bell and David Braben, published by Acornsoft in 1984. Elite-A is a fan-made comprehensive enhancement of BBC Micro Elite, built by disassembling and extending the original game's object code. This repository is Mark Moxon's fully commented edition of Angus Duggan's original Elite-A source, published with Angus's permission as a companion to the elite.bbcelite.com documentation site. It builds into three variants: the version Angus originally released, an unreleased 'source-disc' variant, and a bug-fix variant with BBC Master support.

How it differs from the original

The bug-fix variant fixes a bug in the original Elite-A that broke splinters (making mining nearly impossible), adjusts the cargo capacities shown for flyable ships in the encyclopedia, adds BBC Master compatibility the original release lacked, and lowers ship prices as found in the unreleased source-disc variant.

Getting started

Building it requires BeebAsm and Python, plus GNU Make on Mac/Linux; Windows users run a provided batch build script, Mac/Linux users use a standard make-based build. The build produces a bootable BBC Micro disc image that can be loaded on real hardware (e.g. via a Gotek) or in an emulator, and there's a build option to auto-load the result straight into the b2 emulator.

History

Angus Duggan created Elite-A in the late 1980s by disassembling the original Elite's protected object code and reprogramming the result, reportedly using a BBC Micro fitted with his own handwritten 6502 assembler ROM and Acornsoft's VIEW word processor as his only tools, without any modern development tooling. Ian Bell, co-author of the original Elite, has called it 'a comprehensive enhancement of BBC Elite... a significant achievement for which respect is due.'

Requires original assets. Elite-A is a modification of the original BBC Micro Elite; building from source requires the original game data.

Licensing & legal

The repository has no LICENSE file; under GitHub's default terms that means standard copyright applies — visitors may read and fork it but no other use is granted, done deliberately to respect the underlying Elite source's copyright.