Teletext Elite

About

Elite is a 1984 space-trading game written by David Braben and Ian Bell and published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro, whose revolutionary 3D graphics and open-ended gameplay made it a genre-defining classic ported to virtually every home computer of its era. Teletext Elite is a hack of the BBC Micro disc version of Elite that converts all of its graphics to the BBC's teletext Mode 7, built from a fully annotated disassembly of the original game with every modification documented inline and marked with "Mod:" comments. It can be built from source using BeebAsm and Python on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and its output is checksum-verified against the originally released binaries to confirm the build reproduces the game byte-for-byte outside the teletext conversion.

How it differs from the original

Beyond the teletext graphics conversion, this version also incorporates the flicker-free ship- and planet-drawing routines originally developed for BBC Master Elite.

Getting started

The game is built with the included Makefile (or make.bat on Windows) using BeebAsm and Python, producing a disc image that can be run on a real BBC Micro via a device like a Gotek or loaded into an emulator; the build can optionally auto-load into the b2 emulator or start with a maxed-out commander.

History

The Teletext conversion is one of several documented Elite "hacks" by Mark Moxon, built on Kieran Connell's earlier BeebAsm disassembly of the original 1984 Acornsoft source, with teletext-specific routines adapted from the Bitshifters' teletextr library.

Media

Licensing & legal

• The repository has no license file; under GitHub's default rules this means the code may only be read and forked, not redistributed or reused, since it's derived from Elite's still-copyrighted original source.