Useful links - Elite on the BBC Micro

Here's a collection of links that I've found useful or interesting when working on this project.

General
-------

Ian Bell's Elite site - the most important source for 8-bit Elite fans, quite literally, as without the original source discs released here, none of this would be possible; thank you for the wonderful gift, Ian!
Ian Bell's handwritten dev docs - fascinating relics from the actual development process of Elite
Frontier Astro - if, like me, you don't own all the physical Elite versions but would love to, this is a wonderful resource
Elite wiki classic articles - the Elite wiki gave me a head start on a number of topics and is a highly recommended read
The alt.fan.elite FAQ - I've read this FAQ many times over the years, and although it contains a few errors, it's still a great read from the Usenet era

BBC ASCII character set - I can't tell you how many times I've had to refer to this table when disassembling Elite; I probably should have just printed it out!
BBC MOS disassembly - I found this particularly useful when trying to decipher keyboard translation tables and undocumented OS calls
BBC memory map - when every single byte counts, as it does in Elite, a map is an essential part of the toolkit
Hex and binary converter - probably the web tool I used the most during this project, especially when converting numbers into binary
The 76489 sound chip - I'm not sure I fully understand the sound chip in the Beeb, but this article really helps explain things

JSBeeb (BBC Micro) - An absolute tour-de-force from Matt Godbolt, this browser-based emulator is brilliant for testing Elite builds in all the variations of the BBC Micro and Master
JSBeeb (6502 Second Processor) - strangely the 6502SP version doesn't appear in the JSBeeb versions dropdown, so here's a link straight to it
Using the JSBeeb debugger - a very useful tool when trying to work out what all those zero-page locations actually do
BeebEm - an oldie but a goldie, and particularly useful for screenshots
beebjit - the best BBC emulator for playing with disc protection on the original discs
B-em - you can never have too many BBC Micro emulators, right?

BeebAsm - the wonderful 6502 assembler that powers the versions that are documented on this site
BeebDis - I found this super-useful for disassembling the disc, Master and Electron versions, for which the source discs are lost in time
A BeebDis thread on Stardot - some handy information for users of BeebDis

6502 Second Processor programming - a brilliant article about how the Tube works from the incomparable Tom Seddon
Acorn's Tube application notes (PDF) - the best source of official Tube information, crammed full of details about the 6502 Second Processor
The 6502 Second Processor boxed version - rare as hen's teeth and very kindly archived by the owner, what a prize!
Getting the 6502 Second Processor sources to compile - if you want to build 6502SP Elite from the original discs, you'll need to read this first

Market prices in Acornsoft Elite - a really interesting blog post about trade prices in Elite
Random number generator - a great article on the Elite wiki about the generation and use of the galaxy and system seeds
Random number generation - this doesn't describe the algorithm in Elite, but it's still a great introduction to the topic
Matt Godbolt on text tokens - I wish I'd read this before tackling the text token system, as it's a great read

Classic Elite ships wireframe - a detailed introduction to ship data blocks and what all those bytes actually mean
Yaw and pitch matrices - the heart of Elite's rotation mechanism, explained in matrix format
Ian Bell’s scribbled yaw/pitch calculations - the original matrix calculations from the handwritten cache of dev documents
The small angle approximation - this hack is absolutely fundamental to squeezing the above maths into 8 bits

Elite for BeebAsm - Kieran Connell's original BeebAsm port, without which this project would never have cleared the first hurdle
Original Stardot thread about Elite for BeebAsm - this is the thread I stumbled across during lockdown that started the whole thing
Apple Elite disassembly - brilliant work from Andy McFadden on the Apple II version, particularly in his analysis of the ship-drawing code
Elite Harmless - a knockout project from Kroc Camen that's taking the C64 version and making it even better
Elite: The New Kind source - for those of us disassembling Elite, Christian Pinder is a complete legend, and this is the reason why

Online 6502 disassembler - a super-handy web-based disassembler that takes hex bytes and returns 6502 assembly code
6502 optimisations - not all of these optimisations are used in Elite, but quite a few of them are
Compare and branch logic - if, like me, you can never remember whether it should be a BCC or a BCS after a CMP, this will put you straight
Multiply and divide in 6502 - a really good explanation of the kind of bit manipulation that Elite implements in its maths routines
BIT hopping with EQUB &2C - an interesting thread on a technique that Elite uses quite a lot

David Braben video interview - a fascinating romp through the development of Elite with one of the authors
Right on Commander! - probably my favourite article about the history of Elite, originally from Retro Gamer
Elite (or, The Universe on 32K Per Day) - the Digital Antiquarian's excellent and very detailed article about the history of Elite
Masters of their universe - a great article in The Guardian containing the bulk of the Elite section from Backroom Boys
Elite on Wikipedia - a handy summary of what happened and when
Q&A: David Braben - from Elite to today - another David Braben interview
Rob Northen interview - a chat with the man behind the copy protection used in the original Elite
The Platform and the Player: exploring the (hi)stories of Elite - an interesting academic paper about Elite
The History of Elite: Space, the Endless Frontier - a cracking read, full of detail about how Elite fits into gaming history
The Life of Pi - there's some intesting stuff about Elite in this interview with David Braben about the Raspberry Pi