8bit Autopsy: Elite

Ever wondered how the 3d game for the BBC Mirco Elite managed to fit 8 whole galaxies of 256 planets, and numerous ship designed into on 32k of RAM. Well its time to take Acornsoft's Elite apart and see what makes it tick.

0:00 - Intro
2:15 - Screen mode
3:58 - Procedurally generated universe
5:05 - Planet names
6:00 - Text tokens
7:50 - 3d Graphics
8:56 - Small angle approximation
10:22 - Main loop
11:45 - Loop counter
12:33 - Ship drawing
13:16 - Drawing on screen & the screen co-ordinates system
14:05 - Zero page
14:40 - Acorn Electron version
15:40 - Conclusion
16:12 - Thanks

[Error]

I remember seeing the pre-release adverts for Elite and thought it was just an adventure game with static images because that was all the machines of the day could do. Four of us clubbed together to buy it and gathered around my BBC to play for the first time. To say we were floored would be an understatement; the number of times someone uttered "no f*cking way !" was countless as we spent all night launching, docking, fighting and exploring the galaxies. It still amazes me all they managed to pack into what could only be 20k of memory; the null process on Windows, which by definition does nothing, is 16k.

[jammin]

Re the Electron version: They had already had to cut the game down for the BBC cassette version compared to the disk version, because the tape version had to be all loaded at once whereas the disk version could load more data during launch, hyperspace, and docking. So the tape version had substantially fewer ship types, lacked mining and military lasers, had a simplified docking computer that basically just immediately docked rather than computer-flying the ship, and various other cutbacks. The Electron version (which was tape only) was cut down a bit further from that to fit that machine's limitations, but most of the cuts had already been made for the BBC tape version and the main extra difference was, as you said, the whole Thargoids/Thargons/WitchSpace thing and the lack of colour HUD (which I never noticed because I only had a green-screen monitor anyway...)

[aidanodonnell]

I really liked your description of how the text was also compressed to save memory. It's simply an extraordinary achievement for Braben and Bell to have done so many clever things under the bonnet and still ended up with not just a marginally playable game but a complete knockout.

[swinterstein]

I'd love to get a math lecture on Elite! Pure genius..

[draggonhedd]

Playing Elite Dangerous (the newest installation of the series), its hilarious and awesome how much of it was pulled directly from the original games, including the shape of some of the ships.

[tinman]

The first real mind blowing open world game. It’s an incredible achievement, I’m delighted to watch your video 🥰😍

[firedogbme]

It's fascinating to see how much functionality can be had in just a tiny (by today's standards) bit of memory. Coding something life this really required thinking outside of the box of you'll excuse the pun.

[Trenchbroom]

Yank here, got a pirated copy of Elite for my C64 in 1986 and I thought it was an amazing enigma--so complex and interesting that I had to pursue it further, which meant I needed the instructions. Instead of buying a real copy of the game for $25 I bought a book entitled "How to be elite at Elite" for $12, written by some U.K. gamer who had won a tournament as the fastest person to reach Elite status (supposedly). Using his tips I was able to figure out all of the complex systems, key presses, etc. and thoroughly enjoy the game.

Thanks for the great video giving a breakdown of the code, very interesting stuff. Just watching how fast it was on the BBC computer makes the young kid in me quite jealous (C64 and it's paltry 1Mhz 6502 strikes again).

[cubeflinger]

come on youtube, get this man some more subs. another cracking vid

[zensibleone]

Great video, I remember reading in Retro Gamer a lot of tricks they used to continually scrape a few extra bytes off of the program.

I was late to the party with elite, only playing on the Amiga a few months before Frontier came out. The sense of scale and freedom these games gave was crazy. I remember sitting at Sirroco station with time sped up just to watch the planet-rise.

[That_Handle]

Please, more of these ~"so much done with so little" episodes!!! This topic coverage is fire!
... This video brought back some childhood memories of a crash-course day and over-night reading of both my pocket-PC's manual and ~BASIC programming books that found me feverishly curious, among other tasks, in creating and utilizing 2D and 3D numeric and string arrays to go along with my contemporaneous learning of matrix math. The hours of exercising within the constrained environment and memory capacity of my Tandy/Casio pocket-computer were some satisfying learning experiences so much so that I even waited to upgrade to the 8k or 16k options .... Chose to retain the challenges to myself even when I had PCs with plenty more memory and processing because it pushed growth via creative utilization of the smaller space of the pocket-PC not to forget lessons in simplification, efficient utilization, finding similar estimation-correction calculation methods and when to use them in order to speed up through routines to compensate for its slower processing and LCD display culminating into skills on ~other platforms.
So much enjoyed the level of the breakdown here on the amazingly creative, lean programming used in Elite! 👏👏

[sulrich]

Absolutely mind blowing for it’s time, obsessed with it as a young fella.

[devcybiko]

Kids today. They don't know. ;). 32k was A Lot of memory. Programmers today dont really worry about memory or cpu restrictions. And Maths? Nobody wants to do simple arithmetic let alone the geometry necessary to draw lines and 3d objects. Great video. Thanks for that tear down!

[AlastairMontgomery]

Remembered being so excited to get this for my Acorn Electron, played it constantly after unwrapping it on Xmas day.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

Great stuff! They did such a good job writing it... and you did a great job explaining it!

[TheErador]

Super interesting learning how ppl did so much with so little!

[wimwiddershins]

An amazingly complex game in a tiny amount of RAM.

[Cesar-otxk]

Good video man, an incredible game, years advanced to its time

[FENKJ]

Great work! Thanks for taking the time to produce this video.

[anthonykoller]

My emails are larger than this game, yet they managed to create an entire galaxy with so much less memory than what we use today. But the games of today don’t have the same magic of games from yesterday