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The #C64 version of this game was the first 3D game I ever played, running with less than 64KB of RAM on a 1MHz, 8-bit CPU with a very limited ALU (no hardware multiplication and not even a barrel-shifter).

It's unbelievable that someone was able to code a real-time wire-frame 3D engine on this system and then build a full space sim on top of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhTTpV5qFrs

The reverse-engineered assembly seems very well written, and neatly documented.

Here's the code for the title screen with the rotating Cobra Mk III, with hyperlinks to the various subroutines that draw the ship, the text prompts and polls the keyboard:

https://www.bbcelite.com/elite-a/docked/subroutine/title.html

There is even documentation on how various subroutines interact to build high-level functionality.

Here's a description of wire-frame ship rendering:
https://www.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/drawing_ships.html

#elite #c64 #6502 #assembly #3d #graphics

There's an active #C64 #Elite project which includes commented disassembly of the original code plus an impressive number of improvements

https://github.com/Kroc/elite-harmless#improvements-implemented

Looks like the new Elite Harmless could be built entirely from VSCode

They don't distribute binaries for copyright reasons, but if you happen to have a pre-built binary I'd be interested in... ehm... testing it.

https://github.com/Kroc/elite-harmless/blob/kroc/INSTALL.md
#c64 #elite #retrocomputing #retrogaming #programming

I was able to compile it from sources, but the elite-harmless-fastlines.d64 binary is bugged: