Last Modified Feb 07

Welcome to the Elite Page

One day while trawling the net I stumbled across some talk about a guy who had written and released a Windows version of the original Elite for the PC. This was great news to me as for my previous computers, Acorn Electron, Commodore C64 and the Atari ST I had played for months on this game but as yet I had never found a version to run on my PC. If there was a version out there, I wanted it. After much trawling of the newsgroups I came across a link to the site I was looking for.

If anyone if asking themselves What is this Elite game and why would anybody spend time looking for it when they played way back in the 80's and 90's. Why would anybody do this? Let me explain.

Elite was the first computer game I ever remember being advertised on TV and this was waaay back in the early 80's. Must have been around '83 and it was for the BBC Microcomputer. Elite is a space flight sim where the player flies between planets buying and selling various items of cargo. Of course if that were it then the game would have limited appeal.

The 'spice' of the game came in the fighting off pirates that were intent on stealing your cargo by blowing you up! This gave Elite an Air Combat feel about the game which was just brill and totally additive. The trading part of the gameplay was to allow you to make profit on your spacehops which in turn gave the opportunity to buy improved weapons, improved defence kit's and docking computers??

In order to buy and sell goods you had to dock with a space station which orbited round the planet. Thing is though, the space station rotated round its own axis and the only way to dock successfully was to fly through the docking slot while it was horizontal. Get this wrong and you lost shields or lost cargo or just plain blew up. Bit of a bummer if you just fought your way through the pirate infested space lands surrounding the planet to smear yourself on the side of a large space station but this made the game soo much more addictive.

The first version I had was for the Acorn Electron but I never got the first release due to some reason I have forgotten. Lucky for me as it turned out because the first batch only Galaxy 1 was available out of the 8. Still a huge game like, but not as big as it should have been. The second release had everything fixed and so it was purchased for my good self.

I also bought the Atari ST version when I had that computer and then finally one for the PC. Luckily, I never found the game until after I had completed my Post Grad as my results would have taken a dive.

Anyway the site I found was Christian Pinders Elite Homepages and suddenly the Elite experience was relived. No sleep, constant battle, winning the fights and sometimes losing, the better defenses, the stronger weapons, the extra kit to make the journeys easier, the checking of the stock markets. Sounds like normal life eh? What makes the whole concept so good is that Christian also makes the source code available for download enabling the user to customise the Elite experience to his or her liking. I like that concept a lot.

Christian wrote the code to mimic the original BBC version and he has done a truly remarkable job. For more details about how and why visit his website as listed above and start blasting.

For me though Chris Fleck had added a whole range of goodies that just completed the 'bolt on goodies' experience. This includes Ship ID system, faster more powerful engines and a Cloaking Device - very cool. Christian has always maintained that he rewrote the BBC version for the PC as he considered it the best, but by allowing downloads of his source code he encouraged people to add their own 'devices'. This is exactly what Chris did and its the version I run on my own machine.

However I did change the code to quicken the rate of return through the joystick, ie opposite direction control centered the flight direction. I find it easier to fly but maybe that's just me. Oh and I removed, commented out, the Check Sum code to enable me to alter the saved file commander details thus allowing some interesting weapons to be used. Knife through butter springs to mind.

It is my intention to post my Elite .exe file on the site to allow people to download my version if they so chose but I do so recommend that Chris Flecks version is used as a bolt on to Christian's original rework. For now though I have included an image of my progress to date. Just wish I had the money in real life. Due to the way the game screen is constructed the combat console including the scanner is not available for the print screen option which is a shame. Never mind it's still a right cracking game.