Atomic Elite

= Atomic Elite by David Braben, Ian Bell & Kees van Oss =

Licence
TBC

BBC Micro / Electron Elite &copy; 1984 Acornsoft Re-released in 1986 by Superior Software, under the joint "Superior Software / Acornsoft" label Original authors: David Braben and Ian Bell Acorn Atom Elite by Kees van Oss, 2013

Introduction
A modern Atom conversion of Acornsoft's 1984 seminal 3D space-trading game by David Braben and Ian Bell. Yet another classic game ported to the only Acorn home computer that never received an official release. Right on Commander! N.B. Elite for the BBC Micro, along with much of the Acornsoft back catalogue, was re-released by Superior Software, now Superior Interactive. Both Ian Bell and David Braben at Frontier Developments games development studio maintain Elite web pages.

Discuss Atomic Elite

Atom
Port by Kees van Oss

The source files are taken from the Electron Elite version because the Electron is closer to the Atom than the BBC. Elite is not the best program to read due to a lot of difficult programming techniques and tape protection routines. I managed to produce a source file of the main program which was the start of the conversion. The source files of the BBC version are also online and I downloaded them to use as reference files. They were written in 1984 and were designed to run on a BBC to produce the assembled code file for Elite. This is why there's not a lot of comment in these files but they are nice to have as reference files to understand how things are working.

I took the original Electron version and changed the screen routines. The BBC version has a flight-screen (256x192 pixels) and a panel (256x56 pixels). To fit this in the Atom resolution, I clipped the flight-screen (256x136) pixels and copied the panel (256x56). The BBC font of 8x8 pixels is reduced to 8x6 pixels to fit all text in the flight-screen.

This works fine except for the local/galactic charts. To avoid shrinking all routines to fit in 256x136 pixels screen, I decided to switch off the panel so that the BBC routines for 256x192 pixels could be used. The game is still playing when the charts are displayed and this means that the 3D radar is also updated. In the Atom version I have to stop the game because I copy the panel, display the charts and after selection, copy the panel back.

System Requirements

 * Standard Acorn Atom
 * 32 KB RAM (#0000-#7FFF)
 * 6 KB video RAM (#8000-#97FF)
 * VIA
 * Joystick (Optional)

Joystick Connections
An optional joystick can be connected to PORTB of the AtoMMC interface with software version 2.9.

AtoMMC Joystick - PB0  -  Right PB1 -  Left PB2 -  Down PB3 -  Up  PB4  -  Jump PB5 -  nc  PB6  -  nc  PB7  -  nc  GND  -  GND

Key Reference
Screens

Shift-1 = Front view / Launch Shift-2 = Rear view / Buy cargo Shift-3 = Left view / Sell cargo Shift-4 = Right view / Buy equipment ship Shift-5 = Galactic chart Shift-6 = Short range chart Shift-7 = Data on planet Shift-8 = Planet market prices Shift-9 = Status Shift-0 = Inventory

Flying

< = Rotate acw roll > = Rotate clw roll S = Dive X = Climb SPC = Speed + / = Speed - H = Hyperspace C = Docking

Weapons

A = Laser T = Lock missile U = Unlock missile M = Launch missile

Cursor control charts

G = Cursor left K = Cursor right Y = Cursor up B  = Cursor down O = Home cursor D = Data on system

General

Q = Quiet S = Sound on ESC = Restart (in pause mode) CPY = Pause mode DEL = Resume game