Elite Universe Editor

About

Elite is a space-trading game written by Ian Bell and David Braben; the BBC Micro version is copyright Acornsoft (1985/1986) and the Commodore 64 version was published by Firebird, copyright D. Braben and I. Bell (1985). Elite Universe Editor is a tool, not a standalone game, that lets players create custom universes for classic BBC Micro and Commodore 64 Elite. It supports three original platforms — the BBC Master, the BBC Micro with a 6502 Second Processor, and the Commodore 64 — by pulling together separate submodule repositories for each.

Getting started

Building the BBC versions requires BeebAsm and Python plus GNU Make on Mac/Linux; a Windows build only produces the BBC disc image, while a Mac/Linux build also produces the Commodore 64 version, which additionally needs the VICE emulator's disk-image tool. The resulting disc images are then loaded onto original hardware or an emulator.

Media

Licensing & legal

• The repository has no LICENSE file; per GitHub's default terms, visitors may read and fork it but no other use is granted, to respect the underlying Elite source's copyright.

Additional notes

Technical note

Since no original Commodore 64 Elite source code exists, that version is built by binary-patching the original game disk image — extracting the binaries, injecting newly assembled editor code, disabling copy protection, and repackaging a new disk image — rather than compiling from source like the BBC versions.