Elite on the TI-99/4A – 3D Tech Demo (TMS9900 assembly, work in progress)

A self-playing tech demo of my work-in-progress port of Elite to the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, written in TMS9900 assembly. Everything you see is running on a stock TI-99/4A with the 32K memory expansion (recorded in the Classic99 emulator at normal speed). About AI: this port is being written with the help of Claude, an AI from Anthropic. The ship in this demo is flown by an autopilot that "presses the keys" just like a player would, so the game is playing by its own rules: real-time 3D wireframe ships with hidden lines removed, stardust, radar, dashboard, pulse lasers, explosions, enemy AI that fights back, police from a hostile space station, and ships arriving by Elite's own rules. Chapters 0:00 Title 0:15 The Coriolis space station 1:36 Ship parade: Sidewinder, Viper, Cobra Mk III 3:04 Pirates attack 5:21 Shooting the station – the police come out 6:46 Free flight – Elite's own arrival rules 9:11 The last stand How it works Ships use Elite's own maths: a position plus three direction arrows, nudged a little each frame Ship shapes come straight from Elite's original ship data Game rules follow the Acorn Electron version, the closest match to the TI's speed Far-away ships and radar dots use the TI's hardware sprites Runs at roughly 7–40 frames per second depending on how much is on screen Due to the limitations of the TI994/a I've followed the Electron rules Still to come: near-ship collisions, missiles, docking, trading and the galaxy chart. Elite was created by Ian Bell and David Braben, and belongs to them and Frontier Developments. This is a free, non-commercial hobby project. Ship data and rules were studied from Mark Moxon's fully documented BBC Micro and Acorn Electron Elite source code. #TI99 #Elite #RetroComputing