Elite - David Braben's 8bit space combat trading simulator of Elite gets an Atari XL/XE port demo update by reifsnyderb

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 update of a port to the Atari XL/XE. A version of the game you can see being played in the footage below.

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."

Demo Update :  This release adds many more colors to the instrument panel, NTSC and PAL colors, different colors and shapes for the laser sights, a colored frame around the space view, and has the memory changed to allow for a possible future 1090XL accelerator card.  The music was removed as it didn't sound that great.

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