Frontier Elite Space Trading Game

Frontier Elite II is a space trading computer game written by David Braben and published by GameTek in 1993. It is the first sequel to Ian Bell and David Braben’s earlier game Elite, and is available for Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC computers.

Frontier Elite retains the same principal component of Elite—namely completely open-ended gameplay—and adds to this realistic physics and an accurately modelled galaxy. There is no plot within Frontier Elite, nor are there pre-scripted missions (as there are in its sequel, First Encounters); instead players explore space while trading legally or illegally, carrying out missions for the military, ferrying passengers from system to system, engaging in piracy or any combination of the above. As a consequence, Frontier Elite cannot be completed or “won”—instead, players themselves decide what to aspire to and set out to achieve it.

The game has since been released as shareware and is available as a free download, although being a DOS game, users of post-Windows 98 operating systems may have difficulty getting it to run. Primarily this was because of the game using EMS type memory rather than XMS. The program EMM386 had to be configured to use it. Using emulation such as DosBox will get the official shareware version of the game to run on modern operating systems such as Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.