September 20, 2024 was the 40th anniversary of the day the world first experienced Elite, the 3D space trading and combat game written by Ian Bell and David Braben, first on the BBC Microcomputer in conjunction with Acornsoft.
To commemorate this, Ian Bell has added further sources (Apple, Atari, C64, NES, SNES (unfinished) “Elite”; and BBC “Elite II” (unfinished)) to the Elite Archive.
BBC Elite II is Ian’s part of the inital attempt to better Elite on the 6502 processors. The writing was on the wall though, with the move to 16-bit, so that work was abandoned.
The NES was the most technically challenging port since, even more than the C64, the NES was designed as a sliding sprite box. We already had character-mapped line-draw and log-based multiply from the C64.
The hardest part of the NES port was the split screen mode. David coded the split-screen for the BBC and it was entiely reliant on the 6522 PIT (Programmable Interrupt Timer). There was no accessible timer,let alone one capable of generating interrupts, The usual approach was to use sprite 0 to enter a busy wait for the appropriate VBLANK, but we couldn;t afford busy-waiting even for 8 scan lines. The code had to do something useful and my solution was self-timing code for some key functions. notably transferring or clearing character maps.
See more on the anniversary page and the Elite Home Page.