Elite Ship Viewer

I have fond childhood memories of playing Elite on my BBC Micro Model B.

Elite was written by Ian Bell and David Braben, it was published by Acornsoft in 1984. Initially I owned the BBC Micro cassette version and spent many hours attempting to improve my Combat Rating. Sometime in 1985 I upgraded my BBC Micro to have a disk drive and purchased the disk version to experience the faster load times and the extended range of ships.

Apart from being absorbed by this new style of game play that Elite brought, I was also intrigued by the programming skills used to bring a game like this to the BBC Micro. So when I recently came across the amazing BBC Micro Elite source code website by Mark Moxon, it gave me a chance to actually discover the programming techniques that were used in my childhood's favourite computer game.

As well as documenting Elite's source code, Mark also documented the blueprints of the ships (and other objects) used in the BBC Micro's cassette, disk and Angus Duggan's Elite-A versions. From these blueprints I was able to write a Windows Presentation Framework application to view and rotate the ships. This allowed me to learn 3D drawing techniques, hidden line removal, reminisce of battling against these ships and also easily admire them in all their glory from any angle.

As a programming challenge though, and to share this app with others, I wondered whether this could be written in Blazor WebAssembly with HTML5 Canvas and deployed as an Azure website. This would all be a learning experience for me in these three technologies. The result of this is what the link below will take you to.

Once loaded in your browser, the Blazor WebAssembly allows you to rotate and zoom the ships of each Elite version. The bottom carousel arrows can be used to scroll through all the ships in the selected Elite version. From the left navigation bar, you can select which Elite version to view and choose a specific ship.

I hope you enjoy experimenting with the Elite Ship Viewer and that it brings back memories of playing Elite all those years ago. Feel free to drop me an email at eliteshipviewer@outlook.com regarding the Elite Ship Viewer.

Regards, Philip Fenna

Launch Blazor WebAssembly Elite Ship Viewer