Elite comes to the NewBrain

[vanhauen]

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I have often wondered whether Elite could be made to run properly on beloved NewBrain and as repeated searches couldn’t find a previously documented NewBrain port, a while back I decided to try.

The result is NBElite 1.0: the complete BBC cassette game, running on a stock unexpanded 32 KB NewBrain from a single tape load.

One interesting part of the story is what it took to make it genuinely playable. The NewBrain’s keyboard initially made continuous flight controls awkward. The answer turned out to be buried in a 1983 NewBrain programming article: the machine’s COP processor can be asked to rescan the physical keyboard and tell software whether a key is still being held. That became the final throttle mechanism I needed for finishing the project.

Even then I could not make it fit in memory…I was out by 147 bytes 🙁 Rather than cut functionality, the game was reconsidered globally. Packing 247 ship-edge records from four bytes to three proved to be the best available answer, recovered 231 bytes, leaving the finished native-control version with 83 bytes of code space free!

Alongside developing the playable game, I produced a comprehensive Commander’s Handbook guide (87 pages) and used it as part of gameplay testing.

Have a look at this demo video, operating in native speed: https://youtu.be/s8lEIKqV0pg

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