Elite on the 6502

January 31, 2025 10:04 AM

Elite on the 6502 – A very comprehensive site exploring the source code of Elite, a highly influential space-trading game from 1984, explaining how it did all the things it did within very limited resources. You can play the game in-browser, in various forms. If you're not all that familiar with the game, you might like to read Elite (or, The Universe on 32 K Per Day) at the Digital Antiquarian.
posted by Wolfdog (10 comments total)

JFC I feel like fucking anton ego looking at these links. Nostalgia aint what it used to be!
posted by lalochezia at 10:24 AM on January 31

Wonderful post, thank you.

That first site is a proper rabbit-hole, even moreso having discovered at the bottom of the linked page the author's other "software archaeology" projects. Lander on the Acorn Archimedes did seem like complete magic vs. absolutely all other games to 8 year old me... it's fascinating to read how it was indeed something pretty out of the ordinary under the hood as well.
posted by protorp at 10:50 AM on January 31 [3 favorites]

A simply amazing site for a simply amazing game. I had the Apple][ version (pirated, years after release) and can confirm that it was incredibly impressive but almost impossible to control. There were 3D wireframe games before Elite, and open world trading games before Elite, but only Elite tied an excellently designed gameplay loop to a very impressive technical implementation.

The followup game, Frontier, was even more technically advanced but somehow lost the laser-focus on fun that Elite had.
posted by AndrewStephens at 11:08 AM on January 31 [2 favorites]

The Lander bit is wild - the source code wasn’t released, so they disassembled it then hand-added variable/symbol names, which you’d have to be an impressively accomplished code reader to manage! I had Elite on my C64 (don’t think I had it on my Electron) and was equally amazed by Lander on my school’s Archimedes machines.

Sort of relatedly, it still boggles my mind that the world conquering ARM architecture had its origins in that same “computers for schools” program that birthed the BBC and Acorn.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:13 AM on January 31 [3 favorites]

Elite is the core of Chapter 3 in Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003) [one review] a rather readable nostalgic hagiography of St Braben and St Bell by Francis Spufford.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:50 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]

I still can't get past that one of the cargoes is "slaves"

But if you must play it, the best little Elite easter egg is in Owlet BBC BASIC Editor. Click the 3D button, then once things have loaded , hold down Shift and tap F12 …

And wait: Francis Spufford, as in "Red Plenty" Francis Spufford? That's almost as weird as "Invasion of the Space Invaders" by Martin Amis ...
posted by scruss at 6:12 PM on January 31

The disassembly for Exile is worth checking out too for another seminal BBC Micro game.
posted by donio at 6:20 PM on January 31

Holy hannah, 6502. I did my final year undergrad Comp Sci project using 6502 Assembler.
posted by storybored at 8:50 PM on January 31

It's neat how a 3D engine was possible with the limited memory and compute.

I got Elite: Dangerous quite a few years ago not knowing of the earlier games. One of the things I liked was playing in "flight assist off" mode which was essentially a Newtonian mechanics mode, albeit with some compromises.

But "slaves" is one of the cargos in that game as well. And the flavour text around that is not great. The developers don't have the finesse to pull off unreliable narrator well, and the whole thing is quite distasteful.
posted by mscibing at 6:28 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

I played the C64 version. I don't know how long it took me, but I made it to Deadly. I kept playing it for a while, but the lack of any way to tell how close you were to Elite eventually had me give up.

I did enjoy the in-game tribute to the ST episode, The Trouble with Tribbles.


I wonder if we are going to see a capcha using Elite like they did with Doom. I'd say the goal should be to dock with a station.
posted by john at 7:07 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]