News on the development of the port of «Elite» for Atari 8-bits | Videos
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Mark "Wrathchild" Keates (England) shared a series of videos with the latest developments of his port of «Elite» (Acornsoft, 1984) for Atari 8-bit computers.
As reported on Atariteca, the project dates back to February 2019 when Vladimir "Popmilo" Janković (Serbia) reported via the AtariAge forum about Keates' plans to port the acclaimed space combat and trading video game.
"Wrathchild" revealed in February that he's compared his code to the sources documented on Github for the BBC and C64 versions. "In doing so, I discovered some duplicate variables (i.e. different labels for the same location) and through debugging, I found some code issues and data overlaps." This has allowed him to make some adjustments to the keyboard code mappings, as well as enable other elements such as buying and selling cargo.
Bugs such as the blinking crosshair and the problems with the visibility of the space station have also been fixed. Also, thanks to the support of Mark Moxon - former editor of the "Acorn User" magazine - the problem with the presentation of the star field was resolved.
Keates was later able to enable the feature to search for planets by name. "Having ported over the original C64 code and adjusted for some lower A8 specs, it now works as we expected."
Moxon has also improved the rendering code to use the BBC/C64 "flicker-free" fix, as seen in this side-by-side comparison video.
Finally, the latest update includes some hardware sprites used to represent the crosshairs for the game's various cannons and lasers.
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