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First Non-Commerical Elite?

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:03 pm
by user2357
Greetings, Commanders

Which was the first non-commercial Elite?
When was it developed?
When was it released?

Can anyone beat Angus Duggan's Elite-A?
Developed late 80s; development complete May 25, 1993; release permitted on or before February 11, 1997.

Please confirm.

Thanks for playing along.

Kind regards
user

Re: First Non-Commerical Elite?

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2024 10:45 am
by Redspear
Hi user,

I can't think of an earlier one...

I believe Elite A was originally called Elite III (before the emergenco of Frontier and its sequels), so another question might be what was Elite II? Elite Plus?

Elite A was certainly the first fan 'remake' I ever heard of that wasn't just a conversion to another platform (for sale).

Re: First Non-Commerical Elite?

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2024 6:28 am
by user2357
Thanks, Redspear.

I appreciate your confirming reply regarding the first released, non-commerical, fan remake of Elite.

"Elite II"... If you go to http://knackered.org/angus/beeb/elite.html, and click the "Elite-A.zip" link before the table of contents, to download the zip file, and then open the "elite.pdf" file from that downloaded zip file, you'll see it's pretty much the same info as on Angus's "knackered.org" webpage, but the document is dated "May 25, 1993" (before its official release in 1997). In the introduction, first paragraph, second line, there's a footnote number referring to the bottom of the page, which explains that Angus apparently considered "the normal disc version" as Elite II.

Now the question becomes: which was the "normal disc version"? Both Ian Bell and David Braben seem to have had a different idea regarding what "Elite 2" was, and Mark Moxon lists a whole lot of alternative Acornsoft Elites...

http://www.elitehomepage.org/archive/b5081501.htm (Q4: ‘Elite 2’)

http://www.elitehomepage.org/archive/c2031200.htm (Q6: ‘Elite 2’)

https://www.bbcelite.com/compare/releases.html

Regards
user