CONVERSION CAPERS

THE PROS AND CONS OF THE MANY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF ELITE

BBC

■ Of the original Acornsoft releases, the BBC disk version is the best. It has 18 ships to the tape edition’s six and the Acorn Electron variant’s five. It also has military lasers and secret missions. The BBC Master iteration came out two years later, and is faster and more colourful.

AMSTRAD CPC

■ Like the Spectrum Elite, the Amstrad port was produced by Torus, and it plays identically if slightly slower. Where the Amstrad adaptation improves on its Sinclair counterpart is with its rendering of the action in multiple colours. It also has a pre-game rendition of The Blue Danube.

NES

■ Credited to Braben and Bell, the NES Elite is the latter’s favourite published version of the game. Considered impossible because of the NES’S sprite-based hardware, this adaptation nonetheless manages vectors with ease, and gets around the lack of keyboard with an icon-based system.

ARCHIMEDES

■ While retaining the gameplay established by the original, Warren Burch and Clive Gringras’s Archimedes Elite boasts many enhancements. As well as a graphical UI and filled vectors in-game, it has more ship types and factions, each with unique behaviours – some even battle each other.

C64

■ As with the Acorn versions, the C64 Elite was developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, although it was released by Firebird not Acornsoft. As well as being slightly more colourful than its BBC Micro counterparts, the C64 adaptation plays The Blue Danube when using the docking computer.

MSX

■ Rob Nicholson’s MSX Elite is one of the most colourful 8-bit versions, and like the Amstrad iteration it plays The Blue Danube pre-game. The disk release is the one to play, as it has the original game’s two missions plus the three from the Spectrum Elite – it also has two new ships.

SAM COUPÉ

■ Even if the SAM Coupé Elite is technically a conversion, it wasn’t the conversion owners of the system were hoping for. It’s really just the Spectrum Elite running in an emulator, with the only notable additions being a new loading screen and the option to save your progress to disk.

TATUNG EINSTEIN

■ An accurate port of the Spectrum version, the Tatung Einstein Elite was adapted and sold by Einstein stalwarts Merlin Software. It lacks some of the Sinclair Elite’s visual effects, like when you destroy ships they disappear instead of exploding, but it does have better sound effects.

APPLE II

■ A solo effort by Ian Bell, the gameplay in the Apple II Elite is depicted in the four distinct hues of the system’s unique colour palette. Unlike its Acorn inspiration, the Apple II version is flicker free, and like the C64 Elite it gives you pesky aliens called Trumbles to deal with.

AMIGA

■ Like the MSX Elite, the Amiga version was made by Rob Nicholson. It plays much like the original, but in terms of aesthetics it betters it in every area. Its most obvious improvements are its illustrated trading screens, multicoloured filled-vector visuals and superior sound effects.

ZX SPECTRUM

■ Less colourful than the C64 conversion, and lacking docking music, the Spectrum Elite compensates with nicer looking animations when you leave a space station or jump through hyperspace. It also includes three secret missions that don’t feature in either the C64 or Acorn iterations.

PC

■ Created by Realtime Games’ founder Andy Onions, the PC Elite has pros and cons. Its big advantage over the original is that it has filled vector visuals in place of wireframe ones, but on the downside it runs in four-colour CGA mode – and its chip tune The Blue Danube is an acquired taste!

ATARI ST

■ The third of Rob Nicholson’s Elites is visually identical to its Amiga counterpart, although its title music and in-game sounds aren’t nearly as good. The enemy ships only fire ammo at close range in both 16-bit versions, which makes them far less challenging games than the original.