David Given has ported Acornsoft Elite to the Commodore PET, more than 40 years after the game defined open-world space trading on the BBC Micro. The PET runs the same 6502 CPU as the BBC Micro, just slower, and the port requires 32k of RAM.
The tradeoffs are real. PET block graphics replace the vector rendering that made Elite visually iconic in 1984. Given himself admits the code is a mess and that it does not play well. That honesty is part of why this is worth reading: the technical compromises are documented, not hidden.
All code and disk images are in the GitHub repository at davidgiven/pet-elite. If the port itself is not enough, Hackaday's December 2024 piece on the fully documented Elite source code for the C64 and BBC Micro is the deeper dive this story points toward.
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