Cheesy, I know. It's true though. I've wanted to see Elite on a mobile phone for years, but it's never materialised. It was released a while ago on some PDA but the numpty who did it wanted money for it, so it was pulled.

 

So what do do, I asked myself. Well, after a bout of internet searches it seems clear that no-one is even trying to do it, so the idea occurred to have a go myself.

 

There are a few problems though. I don't know how to program for Symbian or Java. That's a big problem. But hey, I'm a quick learner, so why not give it a go?

 

That's what this section of the site's about, basically. My attempt to make Elite work on a mobile phone. I've opted for a Java approach, since Java seems to have the right amount of support. Most mobile phones now actually (if I read my technical papers correctly) have support for OpenGL!

 

My main problem is understanding and reproducing the Elite codebase. To this end I've made use of the code for the Game Boy Advance version of Elite: The New Kind available from the Quirky Remakes site. Thanks for this code go to Christian Pinder and Richard Quirk, and the credits of any finished application will include thier contributions. Now my task is to reverse engineer the C code and create Java code from it. To that end, it looks like I'm going to do a lot of reading.

 

I'll try to post updates and progress reports as I go. This project should be considered dreamware at the moment, since I'm not even sure I'll be able to do it. At best it's a learning process and no doubt someone out there will beat me to it. If so, then hey ho!

 

Posted on 16th April 2007