Only just recently I was talking to a few friends about the original David Braben’s 8-bit space combat trading simulator of Elite, and how we’ve seen a few fan based remakes appear as well as improvements and ports to different 8bit systems. But this latest news may interest you, if you have an Atari XL/XE however, as reifsnyderb has released a demo of a port to the Atari XL/XE. A version of the game you can see being played in the footage below.
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Here’s the latest from the developer in brief with the full details via the source link below. “Many of us have been teased with a recent non-optimized port of the tape version of Elite and another porting project with no end in sight. As a result, I got frustrated and decided to make it happen myself. Originally, I explored porting the tape version to the CC65. After over an hour of work and study of the source code I realized that was a really dumb idea. It was then that I spent a little while reviewing the differences between the original tape version and disk versions of Elite and then decided if I was going to port Elite to the Atari 8 bit computer I should do the disk version as it has a lot more features.”
Features:
- 31 possible ships
- Enhanced AI and spawning
- Flashing cockpit indicators
- 3 ship colors in 3d scanner
- Colored cross-hairs in space view
- 9 colors on cockpit display
- Proper docking computer
- Ship hanger displayed after docking
- Flicker free ships and space stations
- Both space station types
- Planets have craters, meridians, and/or equators
- Optimizations have been made that include the use of logarithm-based math routines
- …and many more!
System Requirements:
- Atari 400 or 800 with at least 48k of memory and OS/B or
- Atari XL or XE with at least 48k of memory and an XL or XE OS.
- Joystick
- Floppy drive and / or a device that can read from and write to ATR images.
Links :1) Source
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Original article by www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com
