BBC Elite game for Pythonista

[mmccthomas]

I’m pleased to present a “new” game for Pythonista.

https://github.com/mmccthomas/Pythonista_Elite

This is a classic game from 1984, originally on the BBC Micro, but ported to many other machines,
It is a space trading and combat game, using 3D wireframe graphics. At the time it was revolutionary.
There has been a similar game (Galaxy on Fire) from 2004, but I have not seen Elite on the iPad.

I began by using Gemini and Claude AI to convert a C-based conversion of the original 6502 source
code which was released by one of the original authors, into Python for Pythonista.
This captured much of the original logic, but there was a LOT of work to port the graphics to Pythonista
scene library and work within the Scene loop.
The original game was heavily keyboard based, so I implemented a custom onscreen keyboard with
labelled coloured keys, and two onscreen joysticks for direction and speed. Touch has been used instead
of cursor key movement for selecting targets.

This is fairly large piece of work, with 22 modules and some 30 classes. It has taken about 6 weeks to refine to this point.
Hopefully it is bug free!

If there are Elite enthusiasts out there who would like to improve this version, I would love to collaborate.

Chris Thomas
June 2026