Information on the fastest and most colourful version of Elite
For those of us who cut their teeth on the original 1984 version of Elite, the announcement of the 6502 Second Processor version on 25 July 1985 at the Acorn User Show was pretty exciting. The only problem was that you needed a pretty pricey system to run it, which put it beyond the reach of the vast majority of people, though that only made it feel even more exotic for those of us without access to a Second Processor.
Originally known in the Acorn press as Elite II (a name that didn't make it to the final product), this souped-up version has all the features of the BBC Micro disc version, but with a four-colour space screen, an eight-colour dashboard, and no waiting around for things to load from disc. It also supports more ships in the local bubble (up to 18 ships, compared to a maximum of 10 in the BBC Micro cassette and disc versions) which it can handle due to the faster 65C02 processor, and it has some unique features that aren't found in the other official versions, such as a scrolling text demo, printer support and the ability to take screenshots.
Here are some suggestions for exploring this version of Elite:
- Play 6502 Second Processor 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.
- Find out how this version works under the hood with over 100 deep dive articles covering every aspect of the game.
- 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 6502 Second Processor Elite.
- See comprehensive details of all the different variants of this version.
- Download the source 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.