Elite +4 – A flicker free classic as the definitive version for the C64/Plus/4 is now available

Here at Indie Retro News, we’ve always had a soft spot for Elite ever since the original 1984 release and then the fantastic sequel ‘Frontier Elite II’ on the Amiga in 1993. Each one vastly different in graphical quality, but still giving a space-sim sci-fi experience like no other allowing the user to fight in space, trade, complete missions and even in Frontier Elite II land on planets. However for those of you who own a C64 or Plus/4 should check out the latest release of Elite +4. A flicker free version freshly introduced by Mark Moxon – of Pigmy’s great classic Elite +4 as the definitive version for the C64 and Plus/4

Check out that flicker!

Here is what plus4world says about this incredible release for the Plus/4. “Being the coder who fully documented the original BBC version, Mark Moxon has taken his wide knowledge of the game in creating a patch capable to drastically improve the quality of the C64 graphics by removing flicker from the ship-drawing routines. Actually, the code in the patch has been backported from the BBC Master version of Elite, so it is 100% Bell & Braben’s code that’s making its first appearance on the Commodore 64”. 

Now that’s much better!

Plus4world go on to say…”Indeed, the 1986 releases of Elite on the BBC Master and Apple II show a marked improvement in the quality of the wireframe graphics when compared to earlier versions. In the original 1984 and 1985 versions of Elite, such as those for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Commodore 64, ships are animated on-screen by first erasing them entirely, and then redrawing them in their new positions. The improved algorithm in the BBC Master and Apple II versions is similar, but instead of erasing the entire ship and then redrawing a whole new ship, it erases one line of the old ship and immediately redraws one line of the new ship, repeating this process until the whole ship gets redrawn, one line at a time. This interleaving of the line-drawing process results in much smoother ship graphics, and without adding any extra steps, so it doesn’t affect the game speed”.