Elite 2

The BBC Micro Elite 2 or Elite II was an unfinished attempt by Ian Bell and David Braben to improve Elite on 6502 processors, but abandoned due to the emergence of 16-bit computers.

The code was made public on the 40th anniversary of Elite's launch.

According to Christian Pinder, Elite 2 was going to be a complete re-write of all the code. Features believed to be:

• Player no longer at co-ords 0,0,0 with everything moving around them. The player's ship now moves through space as you would expect.
• New space dust routine.
• Ships could have turrets.
• Ships could attack each other.
• Player could have AI buddies that flew with them and helped in battles.
• Forth style scripting language that the galaxy generation was going to be written in.
• New math routines.
• Possibly code in there to model planets orbiting a star.
• The ship drawing routine optimized for a lot of the Elite ships being mirrored along one axis.
• New planet styles (ones with rings, coastlines?, crescent shape). I think only the crescent shape one was coded.

See also

• Board post listing Christian Pinder's recollections

Download

• The Elite 2 source code is available from Ian Bell's web site.