Imagesource: https://www.bbcelite.com/

When Elite was released in 1984 by Ian Bell and David Braben for the BBC Micro and the Acorn Electron, I was barely learning to write and read. (Singing and clapping was a year earlier.) And while that memorable event is now almost 40 years ago, (so Elite, not the clapping 🤡) there's no denying its significance.

The game has been ported in the ensuing years for pretty much every platform that cursing parents put under their kids' Christmas tree in the 80s. What made Elite so unique at the time (at least to me) was the freedom of the gameplay and of course the wireframe 3D graphics.

The game definitely opened up the genre of Space Trading and turned a whole bunch of me and my friends into space pilots. 🧑‍🚀

And this thing can't be killed. Currently, it's not the flickerfree variant by Mark Moxon aka @markmoxon that's making the rounds. Mark has recently made the entire source code of the BBC Micro release completely documented available to the astonished general public.

If you want to know how to get 3D wireframe graphics running on a 6502, or are otherwise interested in the subject, you can find the entire package with all the details at www.bbcelite.com.