Information on the enhanced version of the original Elite
If you are going to play just one version of BBC Micro Elite, make it this one. Launched in September 1984 alongside the cassette version, the BBC Micro disc version plays just like its tape-based sibling, but contains a number of extra features that make it the canonical version of Acornsoft Elite.
These enhanced features include: lots of additional ship types, the Dodo space station, mining and military lasers, two missions, a proper docking computer, the ability to search for systems by name, a glimpse of the ship hangar when docking, and Bitstik support. Later versions of the game may have added more colour and speed, but none of the official variants messed about with the core gaming experience that was laid down in the venerable disc version. (That task was left to Elite-A, which mixed things up quite a bit, and to great effect.)
There is also a variant of disc Elite for BBC Micros fitted with sideways RAM, written by Stuart McConnachie; this variant was not officially released, but is available from Ian Bell's website. This variant loads all the ship blueprints into sideways RAM, thus removing the restrictions of the disc version's ship blueprint files (which you can read about in the deep dive on ship blueprints in the disc version). See the section on the sideways RAM variant for more details.
Here are some suggestions for exploring this version of Elite:
- Play BBC Micro disc Elite in your browser, in either the original or the flicker-free version (read more about the latter).
- Play BBC Micro sideways RAM Elite in your browser, in either the original or the flicker-free version (read more about the latter).
- Download a disc image of this version from the downloads page, which you can load into an emulator or real machine.
- Find out how this version works under the hood with over 100 deep dive articles covering every aspect of the game.
- Navigate the codebase using the map of the source code, A-Z index and source code cross-references.
- See the code statistics for this version.
- See exactly how this version compares to the others in the feature comparison table.
- Examine the code variations between the different versions by comparing the code for features of BBC Micro disc Elite.
- See comprehensive details of all the different variants of this version.
- Download the game disc from Ian Bell's site as a disc image.
- Build this version from the source code with the accompanying GitHub repository.
- See this game in the BBC Micro Games Archive.