Taking 8-bit Elite into another dimension with anaglyph 3D and coloured specs
If I could travel back in time to 1984 and meet 14-year-old me, the thing we'd be most excited about would be Elite in the Oculus Rift. I backed the original Elite Dangerous Kickstarter in 2013 when VR wasn't even on the to-do list, and I happily played the flatscreen version until Frontier dropped support for the Mac, at which point I was obviously completely gutted to have a legitimate excuse to buy a PC and invest in a VR headset. It was in the summer of 2017 that I first launched from a Coriolis station in fully immersive VR, and it is still the most impactful gaming experience of my life, by a very long way.
Of course, back in 1984 when I was falling in love with Elite on the BBC Micro, "virtual reality" meant something quite different. The previous year had seen the release of Jaws 3D, where moviegoers put on polarised 3D glasses to experience shark shenanigans in a full three dimensions, but the movie turned out to be dreadful and the 3D effects questionable, despite a hugely enthusiastic - and hopeful - audience. It would be more than a decade before Nintendo brought out the Virtual Boy and enjoyed the same lukewarm response to its own take on stereoscopic gaming; and even into the 2010s, TVs came with 3D glasses that inevitably ended up gathering dust at the back of the cupboard. Despite all the effort, old-school 3D never really took off, but it's still a fond memory of what might have been, for those of us who were there.
So when the idea of a 3D version of Acornsoft Elite was jokingly mentioned on Stardot, who should spot it but Kieran Connell, who not only got me involved in Elite analysis in the first place, but also provided me with the impetus and inspiration to hack both music and teletext into the original Elite. He kindly sent me some notes on the prize-winning anaglyph 3D demo that he wrote for the Archimedes in 2023, and we both filed the idea under "crazy ideas (part 11)" and moved on to other projects.
But of course, once you get thinking, you tend to get coding, and the result is what you see here: an anaglyph 3D version of BBC Micro Elite that is just as frustrating as all those other 3D experiences from the 1980s, but also just as exciting. It runs on 100% original 1980s hardware - specifically a BBC Micro or BBC Master with a 6502 Second Processor - and all you need is a pair of 3D specs, which you can pick up from Amazon for a pittance, if you don't already have an old pair lying around (the game supports six different types of anaglyph glasses, so almost any pair will do).
The dashboard and text screens are in 2D, but the game itself is in 3D, so there's a whole extra dimension for ships, asteroids, stations, suns, planets, stardust and even the ship sticks on the scanner. And because anaglyph 3D is such a fickle beast, there's also a tool that lets you load static scenes from the Elite Universe Editor and display them in 3D, where you can tweak all the relevant settings to suit your eyesight and screen setup. It is far from perfect and is absolutely not the optimal way to play this game... but it's Elite! In 3D! On original 1980s hardware! Just like in my dreams!
So if I could travel back in time to meet 14-year-old me, this is the gift I'd take with me. I might be spoiled by Elite in modern VR, but this version is retro-futurism taken to another dimension, and I'd have absolutely adored it back in 1984...
And I hope you do too.