A free reimplementation of Elite Plus (1991), the PC version of Elite.
The game's files are in this browser from an earlier visit.
For the title, the Elite theme (Aidan Bell's, arranged by C. Abbott) can play instead of the game's own music: add b8060000.mp3 from Ian Bell's Elite archive.
Witchspace contains no part of the original game. It needs three files from Elite Plus (ELITE.EXE, ELITE.GRF, ADBLUE.MID, about 350 KB).
It can download them for you from the copy on Ian Bell's Elite pages (Elite's co-author's), through its mirror at the Internet Archive. They then stay in your browser's storage on this computer and are never sent to us or anyone else. Elite Plus is still under copyright (© 1991 Chris Sawyer, Realtime Software, Bell & Braben): whether to use that copy is your decision.
Or use your own copy: choose the three files from your Elite Plus folder, or a zip from Ian Bell's Elite archive as it is (b1022000.zip, the game as sold).
Saved commanders stay in this browser (none yet). Import saved games from the original or from elsewhere (.CDR files, or a zip of them: George Hooper's one for each mission, for one), then load them in the game (Esc, Load). Export yours to keep them. While playing, drop files on the game.
↑ ↓ pitch, ← → roll, . faster, , slower, Space fire. Commands are the icons along the bottom: press 1–9, 0, -, = (or F1–F12) for the icon in that place. Esc: the menu (options, keys, save, load).
The original's manual explains the rest: trading, combat, equipment, missions.
Witchspace 0.1.8. Source code, the desktop version and the changes: github.com/rembish/witchspace. With thanks to Ian Bell's Elite pages, which keep Elite Plus and the Elite theme. Elite is a trademark of Frontier Developments; Witchspace is not affiliated with them. Witchspace is under the BSD 3-Clause License; it contains third-party software (Nuked OPL3, LGPL-2.1+; SDL2, zlib; Emscripten, MIT, with musl).