Fully documented source code for Elite on the BBC Micro

Near the back there was a two page table containing a dense opcode map (the byte values) of the 6502, its mnemonics, and a tiny notation hinting what they might do.

I've just looked it up. It's the "old" book of that name, not the "new" one. See pages 502-503 of this scan: http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf Poorly scanned, but I recognise the table.

I stared at that table, intrigued, not really knowing what it was, until I started guessing what the mnemonics stood for. Gradually it made sense - after months!

Eventually I was able to guess enough to write 6502 inside BBC Basic, and some time after that I was able to disassemble binaries in 6502 and Z80 (I had a Z80 second processor), and eventually graduated to hacking games to modify them, give them infinite lives, change the keys, things like that. No doubt there was the occasional bit of assembly language in magazine listings to provide a guide to the syntax.

I don't remember having a 6502 disassembler, but I don't remember writing one either. I did receive a lot of games and utilities so I might have received a disassembler too. Hacking games that don't want to be hacked required a fair amount of dedication though, so I might have written one among the other tools needed for hacking; I don't remember.

My favourite BBC Micro hacks were:

- Poking the ULA with a non-standard palette bit pattern, allowing me to produce a 7-colour mode in high resolution (contradicting the received wisdom about what was possible to pack into the pixel bytes), and similar colour graphics quality to a ZX Spectrum. I ported a game from the Spectrum using this technique, but never published it.

- Pixel-smooth vertical scrolling by poking the CRTC on timed interrupts to modify the character height dynamically, so as to squash a row at the top and expand a row at the bottom to shift the image with pixel precision (contradicting the received wisdom that the CRTC could only scroll character cells).

- "Super mode 7", running the Teletext mode with the pixel clock set to double frequency like in mode 0. This caused the Teletext character generator to process 80 characters per line instead of 40. But instead of showing 80 characters, it showed every alternate character, while still updating the colours or other attributes from the hidden characters. This allowed clean coloured text to be displayed without gaps between different colours as Teletext normally required. Proper syntax highlighting :-)

- Mixing graphics and Teletext on different rows using timed interrupts, so as to render something like a text editor with pixel graphics in between blocks of text. This is a variation of the technique used by Elite to show a colourful status area with a higher-resolution main 3d area.

- Modulating the volume on the sound channel at high speed, to turn the sound chip into a DAC, and therefore any audio waveform we wanted.

I miss those fun days, where we could prod and poke at things and all sorts of useful magic happened.

Glad to see I wasn't the only one (I mean that in a nice way!)

I recommend everyone should read some well optimised code occasionally, and figure out how it works, to see how it's done.

I didn't know much in the way of assembler techniques before reading the Elite code. For example I didn't even know how to do things like multiply or square root, or draw lines efficiently. That's where I learned those things.

It did take quite a lot of studying the printout to get it. So many "aha! that's how they do it" moments.

The ZX spectrum Next looks amazing. Then there is the 8-bit guy's Commander X-16 which is being built by him and many other volunteers and should be ready for Kickstarter soon. Also there is the Mega65 project which is a very similar project to the Commander X16. Also there is the Color Maximite 2, which seems to be a screaming fast BASIC computer not meant to be fully compatible with any machine that I'm aware of. Some of these are implemented on FPGA and others on actual chips and some have the keyboard/computer integrated, while others do not. Either way, I'm really excited to finally be able to buy one of these fun old machines where you can fully understand the full system and easily make simple games.

Same for me! Not that I could read the code, but my desire to try to cheat in the game led me to learning BASIC and then a career in software engineering.

Personally I find Elite Dangerous to be tremendous fun, and extremely good value for money considering how little I paid for it and how many hours of gameplay I got out of it. Having played the original, I am looking forward to the updates!

One of the reviews of the company (glassdoor?) mentions the mess of the codebase, and I can imagine that contributes to the slow releases, but I guess that's true of any legacy giant codebase; having worked somewhere where the code was 20+ years old and a few key architects were the only ones who knew/understood how anything worked, they became the bottleneck to development whilst the rest of the team were under constant pressure to produce output whilst being devoid of understanding of the code. With the "gatekeepers of knowledge" being the only ones that could help the rest of the team, they were too busy to educate others as they were producing 80% of the output to keep the business operating; I wondered from an outside perspective if this was what happens at Frontier a bit?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/frontvm/

I put every version I could find there, it starts as a specialised emulator to run frontier based on the ST version, then it became a 68000 to i386 asm/C and then added in OpenGL rendering.

It’s pretty cool

http://www.elitehomepage.org/faq.htm#A3

This is what analysing the source made me feel:

"Every little step forward, I felt like I was unpicking a bit more of the story of two young developers creating a modern-day masterpiece; if you squint carefully, you can almost sense where the whole starts to become greater than the sum of the parts. Elite is the coding equivalent of 'A Day in the Life', a mash-up between the Acorn world's very own Lennon and McCartney, with results that are just as seminal in their field. They say you should never meet your heroes, but grokking their source code... well, that's another matter altogether."

Quote from: https://www.bbcelite.com/about_site/about_this_project.html

The flight model is great, you get detected by your heat signature which depends on the power your ship is using. You can turn off subsystems (like shields) to reduce your heat signature so you can't be targeted, or dump all the heat into a piece of metal that you eject from your ship and shows up on enemy radar. Mining is great too, but overall there's no overarching progression target. In good game design progression should open up new experiences, here (after you collect enough money, which can be done in a few hours) every part of the game is accessible, and none of them lead to anything worthwhile. You just keep doing the same things with more expensive equipment.

Also you don't need a powerful machine to play the game, it's runs flawlessly on my laptop in 1080p (Fedora + Intel HD520).

Elite was pretty addictive, and I have a weak spot for that kind of mechanism that apparently has only one way to resolve it.

Were there actually any generation ships?

(Site author here, incidentally.)

Elite was also available on the C64 running at 1Mhz on a 6510.

I was still useless at the game.