NES Elite

About

This repository holds the source code of Elite for the NES, reconstructed by hand from a disassembly of the original game binaries, with every line documented and (for the most part) explained. It builds a fully working ROM image that runs in an emulator or on a real NES via a flash cart, in two variants: the Imagineer PAL release and the NTSC version from Ian Bell's personal website.

Getting started

Building needs the BeebAsm assembler, Python and make; running make (or the included batch file on Windows) produces a PAL ROM image, and build options select the NTSC variant, a maxed-out test commander, or skip checksum verification. Readers who just want to study the code are pointed to the companion website, which presents the same commentary in a friendlier layout.

History

NES Elite was written by Ian Bell and David Braben (copyright 1991/1992) as a conversion of BBC Master Elite, itself descended from the 1984 BBC Micro release. This project, part of Mark Moxon's series of documented Elite sources, is based on the NTSC archive released on Ian Bell's website and started from a fork of Kieran Connell's BeebAsm version of Elite.

Licensing & legal

• The repository deliberately ships with no licence: because the commentary is intertwined with the copyrighted original code, only reading and forking are permitted, and the author says he will comply if the rightsholders ask for it to be taken down.