Information on the cut-down version of Elite for the Beeb's little brother
Although it isn't a BBC-branded machine, the Acorn Electron is very much cut from the same cloth as the BBC Micro, so it's no surprise that Elite was released for the Electron only a matter of weeks after the original BBC Micro version.
Unfortunately, because the Electron doesn't contain a 6845 CRTC chip like the BBC Micro, the screen mode can't be reprogrammed in the same way, so the memory-saving square screen mode of the BBC version had to be dropped, along with a few core features that would no longer fit into the reduced memory available.
The Electron version of Elite is essentially a cut-down version of the cassette version that's missing the split-screen mode, suns and Thargoids, but otherwise it is still very much Elite. It is also noticeably slower than the BBC Micro version, but that arguably makes it a bit easier to play.
Here are some suggestions for exploring this version of Elite:
- Navigate the codebase using the map of the source code, A-Z index and source code cross-references.
- Find out how this version works under the hood with over 120 deep dive articles covering every aspect of the game.
- Play Acorn Electron 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.
- 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 Electron Elite.
- See comprehensive details of all the different variants of this version.
- Download the game from Ian Bell's site as a UEF file.
- Build this version from the source code with the accompanying GitHub repository.
- Visit Frontier Astro to see the box contents for this version of Elite.