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.)
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).
- Download a disc image of this version from the downloads page, which you can load into an emulator or real machine.
- 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.