Whilst doing some preservation work, we chanced across a couple of binary files which are a slightly earlier build of Elite on the NES by Imagineer. Out in the wild are builds 2.8 and 5.2 which are dated 04 March 1992 and 24 April 1992 respectively.
Here we have 2.5, a Valentines Day build from the 14th February 1992. So almost a month earlier than 2.8 and over 2 months older than the final build. Oddly, the binary was split into two 128K files which had to be joined together again to create a working ROM file. You may find that it doesn’t run in some emulators.
It isn’t clear what differences there are in the game at this stage and unfortunately time is limited to do a deep dive ourselves. It’s likely to be tweaks and refinements to the game-play, and also bug fixes.
Mark Moxon, who has reversed engineered Elite and documented across many different platforms, took a look at the prototype and hasn’t spotted anything hugely different. Things that were spotted so far are:
- Version number added to the start of each ROM bank
- Missing a routine that resets all the variables when the game is first ran.
Mark will let us know if anything else is spotted, and we’ll keep updating the page as more comes to light. If you find any major differences, please do get in touch and we’ll update this page over time.
With thanks to Mark Greenshields for allowing us to release from his archives and Mark Moxon for taking a look at the prototype and sharing his findings.
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