No. Elite relied very heavily on being able to reprogram the video chip on the fly at different scanlines to produce custom modes. If you don't have the exact same video arrangement there is almost no chance that it will run unmodified.
"Elite" is a suitable name for the game, when the coding prowess is considered as the truly "Elite" thing about it.
The problem was that timing the switch point in software was fraught with trouble because you just might end up making the switch at the wrong moment which caused it to jump vertically (or garble a part of your screen). The other problem was that if you wanted perfect timing it was possible but that left you without enough cycles to run your game. Braben & Bell solved this to the point that it was considered stable enough for inclusion in production. Similar hacks had been done on the Atom prior to the BBC so it wasn't as if the knowledge wasn't out there but no game publisher had - as far as I know - seen fit to release a game that used it.
It would be great if you could answer this and point out exactly where this was used prior to Elite on the Beeb, that would set the record straight on this once and for all.
https://www.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/the_split-screen_mode.ht...
My favourite inplementation of this technology is in Geoff Crammond's Revs, which doesn't flicker at all, as the palette switches are cleverly done where they won't be seen if they aren’t perfect. Read all about it here:
https://revs.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/hidden_secrets_of_the_c...
It’s genius.
The balance has shifted to the point where your program is likely only an extremely small fraction of the total that is running on your machine and that powers your application. So it has simply become impossible to be that familiar with the remainder.
I believe that assistive technologies, from the most advanced tools we have today, to the most mundane of "hinting of parameters to a function" and code base navigation via "jump to definition/declaration" which first started appearing in Visual C++ 6.0 around 1998 there has been a degradation in committing facts about the architecture of the code and functions and APIs to memory.
This isn't a case of "bah humbug, the youth of today and their fancy geejaws" but very much a case of "why bother remembering that when the machine will remind me." I am sinful of this too. Guilty, as charged, m'lud.
My conclusions are very much observational but also align with the scant amount of professional research done on the subject. For confirmation bias, I recommend the Outer Limits episode "Stream of Consciousness."
I note that there are four areas in life where this is occuring most profoundly: cooking, navigation, software development, telephone numbers (and other contact details). Whilst it has been many years since I could tell what every cycle, byte and register was doing in any reasonably complex system I work on, I can still walk through most of what is going on in a system from the silicon running the code to the UI appearing on another person's screen on the other side of the world.
It isn't the understanding, it's the remembering what that function was called again, and where did I put that function I wrote ten minutes ago?!? And it isn't age related, because I've tested that hypothesis too both on myself and on others. Assistive technologies are wonderfully enabling, but they make us dumber.
I can see the difference in my own head: the knowledge I have about the 8 bit systems that I worked on is pretty much complete, from the hardware schematic, instruction set, memory map, ROM contents all the way up to whatever code I wrote back in the day.
As opposed to the UNIX systems that I worked on, which for me really predated any assistive tech because I didn't use any. But my knowledge about the C-standard library, while good is not 100% coverage and I know I occasionally have to look up the parameters to various functions.
And then we come to today, where for my current project (pianojacq.com) I still don't use any assistive technologies (no, seriously) but I also know that I do not know more about the runtime environment than I absolutely need to get the job done.
I don't have a smartphone, obviously I'm getting older as well but my own code I know inside out, for all of those phases.
You probably already know this, but to fill in context the screen would flicker because the NMI that handles disc IO would fire, and would be serviced before IRQ1 if both fired together, and also you cannot interrupt an interrupt.
BBC Micro Advanced User Guide pages 359 and 370 detail the 6845 and ULA demonstrated Mode "8" and I recall Practical Computing and Acorn User also had listings for doing tricks with the interrupts and the mixed mode, though don't ask me issue numbers.
I picked a random video of yours "ABug 09 Explaining Elite" and jumped forward to 2:22 to skip the intro, and said "oh, that's a matrix transposition function" when the code popped up on the screen. It's funny how some of that crap sticks with you.
Elite was an amazing achievement.