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Comment by drill_sarge | Hacker News Reader

I played the C64 version a while ago and it really hasn't aged well. If you want to play it (again) you should go straight with the MSDOS (plus) version.

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Is there a reason I wouldn't want to fire up the original BBC version?

Also, surely there must be a js/canvas port by now.

EDIT: the author apparently recommends the NES version: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/nes/index.htm

Well, Archie or Amiga versions might be worth a look. Bell does say "regarded by many as the best ever version" about the Archie version on the page: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/game.htm

Though I was on an Amiga (and the then-poor PC with CGA or EGA in school, bleh), have never tried the Archie version:

Amiga Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsuWgLEQBxM

Archie Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRBuTU9ovP8

There's also Frontier: Elite II. By that stage, high-end PCs were beginning to outperform low-end Amigas at some brute-force processing tasks including software 3D rendering, so the graphics are arguably better on the PC version (limited texture mapping, edit - though OTOH it sort of looks out of place looking at it now, the amiga version with no textures is more consistent and clean visually if perhaps less technically impressive), you needed a pretty-much PC-priced-anyway high-end/accelerated Amiga model to run at the frame rate shown in the video:

Amiga Elite II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzEj4Gq7fT4

PC Elite II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjoMq-H3b8o

The Commodore 64 was my first home computer, and Elite was hands-down one of the jewels on that platform when it came out. Yes, it hasn't aged well....but when it was new, it was breathtaking.

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