I was thinking about make a great page about this game, but the greatest
page you'll find about it is from one of the original authors,Ian Bell.
His page, Ian
Bell's Elite Home Page is rather nice.You can download the MSX version
there as well.
For the freaks (like me :-) you can find the original BBC sources on
his page and some c-reverse enginered sources can be found here.
Ofcourse I have mirrored the reverse enginered code.
I also have the original BCC code mirored here. Note that this code
is like most of the MSX basic code I wrote, before the time that I got
convinced that sometimes it is a "good thing (tm)" to program in a more
modular fashion, and making sure that it is maintenable at a source level.
It had to be stored on a small disk, so if spaces weren't needed, they
were removed. Also a ":"-sign takes up lesser space in memory than starting
a new line so the lines are verry long. And comments also take up to much
space !
The result is ofcourse a completely unmaintainable, unportable and
human-unreadable source. Anyway you can always have a look at them. here
are the seven files :
elitea.txt
eliteb.txt
elitec.txt
elited.txt
elitee.txt
elitef.txt
eliteg.txt Enjoy !
Here you can find the Dark Wheel novel that came with
the Gold version of the game. I didn't need some OCR program and a scanner, I
just found it on the Net.
The SHIP IDENTIFICATION CHART however, that one
I've scanned myself. Since the original was an poster in A3 format and the scanner was
A4 sized, there are some glitches in the reconstructed image.
You can always
visit the Elite
FAQ to find an answer to most of the questions you may still have
Box front | Box back |
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The text on the back reads as follows
Command your Cobra space ship in a fantastic voyage of discovery and adventure, a supreme test of your combat, navigational and entrepreneurial skills.Now, if that doesn't sounds promissing, what does ?
Trade between countless planets, using the proceeds to equip your ship with heat-seeking missiles, beam lasers and other weapons - corporate states can be approached without risk, but unruly anarchies may be swarming with space pirates.
Black market trading can be lucrative but could result in skirmishes with local police and a price on your head.
However you make your money, by fair means or foul, you must blast onwards through space annihilating pirate ships and hostile aliens as you strive to earn your reputation as one of the Elite!
The people who already own the original game on MSX will probably notice the
fact that the screenshot on the back of the box is'nt of the real MSX version.
A lot of MSX'ers noticed this already with a lot of Japanese products that
were developped for multiple platforms. Illusion City for example, had
screenshots of the x68000 version printed on its cover. So the box producers
had to make only one backpaper and only the front had to be redone according
to the system it was intended for. But in this case there is an even more
simple explication. The MSX box isn't really meant for MSX at all !!
I scanned to title on the box again and manually altered the filter
settings. After running some color enhance filters in the GIMP over it
you can see clearly that the MSX ticket is simply glued over the old Spectrum
48K that was really printed on the box.
After using a edge detection algorithm it is very clear.