Elite: "The game that couldn't be written"
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an amazing overview of the technical feats and history behind Elite, and cite it for what the 6502 could do.
What it is
An hour-long video essay on Elite, the 1984 BBC Micro game by David Braben and Ian Bell. It covers how they fit a 3D engine, economy and universe into 22KB on a 2MHz 6502.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec hyperbrainer · 2025-02 · on “Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented”
Alexander the Ok, on youtube, has an amazing video on this. It is not quite as technical as the webiste for obvious reasons, but great overview and historical facts as well. [this video]
Recommends maxbond · 2024-04 · on “Oolite: An open source open-world space opera”
Reposting an old comment[1] which may be of interest to Oolite players: > Elite: "The game that couldn't be written" > An hour long video essay about the classic game Elite, the BBC Micro, and how Elite was able to deliver an open-world 3D experience in the 1980s. The creator is "Alexander the ok." [this video] [1] [LINK]
Cites kragen · 2024-11 · on “Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?”
We were talking about "the 70s and 80s", not 01959. My point about APT is that a "beefy machine" in 01959 was the embedded controller in your keyboard by 01983; it wasn't a beefy machine any more. The PDP-8 was indeed pretty common for CNC control in the late 01960s, and it could run about 333000 12-bit instructions per second, which is about half as fast as the original IBM PC. So, yeah, a machine like that was exactly a home PC by the mid-80s. For real-time control of the 3-D printer, you can get by with less. There were three big problems for manipulating 3-D models for home hobbyists in the 70s and 80s. One was computational speed: for games, you need to render the 3-D graphics fast enou