Hey everybody!



For the past several weeks, I have been working on a port of Elite (1984) for the calculator, written entirely in C. The minimum viable product in my mind includes all features of the original cassette release. Well-documented source code has made the project much easier than reverse-engineering the game, but significant portions of the code (and behavior) are still original, created by me to better suit the medium.

I'm posting this now because I've almost reached the beta phase of development! So far, almost all features of the original are included (or approximated), with the remaining gaps in the roadmap being ship AI (mostly for missiles), Thargoids' complete absence, actual attack values for lasers, and enemies' ability to attack.

Current features:

Full 3D wireframe graphics and flight



Economy simulation & trading



Thousands of star systems to explore



And more!

I have a Github repository for the project as well, if anybody is interested in looking at it.

Wow that looks amazing! You've done a great job with the wire frames. I'm really looking forward to seeing progress on this!

Extremely awesome work! Elite is a well suited game for calcs, great stuff!

I'll definitely check it out.

Wow, that looks great! Looks like it's running really smoothly too.

Looking forward to more updates!

That is indeed looking great, and a very accurate rendition of the original to boot! I look forward to giving it a try, and please feel free to upload a beta to our archives when you're ready.

Wow, looks great ^_^ great choice of game too; I'm a huge fan of space games. X3 is my most recent obsession lol

Wow, this is indeed quite cool. Best of luck working on this

Yeah, I am too. I say I picked Elite because it was visually impressive and because it was well-documented how it worked, but to be honest, all the time I've put into its descendant Elite: Dangerous might have also had an impact.



Surprisingly, yes! The very high speed of the eZ80 seems to be really working out for this project, as I actually haven't done the graphics the "right" way. The menus are all drawn only once on load, and then the cursor is undrawn and redrawn each frame with XOR logic, but the flight screens are actually all drawn each frame from scratch. I kept thinking that at some point I'd have to go back and implement the line heaps and such to be able to undraw/redraw like in the original, but at this point it seems not to be necessary. The slow memory on the calculator might also make it actually faster to just recalculate each frame? That doesn't seem right, though, considering all the memory used in the vector math.

Oh, right-- for this project, I also wrote an original graphics library and a linear algebra library, because as far as I could tell from the documentation, graphx.h doesn't have XOR functionality. The graphx library is used to draw the dashboard (as three sprites and a bunch of rectangles), but everything else is drawn with my own xorgfx.h. xorgfx does of course rely on graphx for the address of the screen, but in theory it would be quite easy to remove that dependency. Oh, and it draws circles as an approximation with a bunch of lines and trig LUTs. I could bundle and release xorgfx.h, linear.h, intmath.h, and trig.h as their own advanced game graphics library at some point if they could actually fill a niche in the community? Surely I'm not the first one to do linear algebra on a calculator, though.

Thanks for the support, everybody! I'll try to get a working (and documented) beta build up by the end of the month.

I've played Elite for the NES before, and I must say, this is an amazing port of the BBC Micro version. I do wish the docking computer came with the ship as in the NES port, but otherwise great. I can't seem to find the dodecagon station in the Diso system, though.

Are you playing the alpha from the GitHub repo? It should be possible to get the system to spawn just by jumping towards the planet a few times and then waiting to get close enough. The speeds and distances were a bit weird, but the compass should change and the S turn on eventually...

Man now I want to see that old wire frame star wars arcade on calc.

This project looks awesome. I always love when I see fast 3D stuff on a calculator.

I actually played that game at a bar located about 30 minutes by foot from my home. I don't know if it's still working but I spent most of my time playing that cabinet since all arcades in the bar were unlocked (required no quarters) at the cost of a drink every hour or so. It was just amazing to see that particular rare arcade machine in action in person, especially considering how old it is.

Yes. I'll try that, thanks. And I also love Atari Vector cabinets