I've been looking through the source code (well the excellent comments) to see if I could discover the reason for something that has puzzled me for over 30 years...
In the summer of 1990 I was doing my usual thing of flying around the starting systems shooting things up and failing to dock at the space stations. Something curious happened: I destroyed a pirate ship (either with the pulse laser or a missile, I don't recall) and received a bounty of 8000+ credits. I'd never seen that size of bounty before and never have since.
If I'm reading the source code correctly, though, that bounty should be impossible - as far as I can see, when you kill something the game reads two values from the blueprint, adds them together, and adds the result to the cash pot. I can't see any sort of multiplier that would account for my 8000+ credit bounty.
That said, I always thought my version of Elite was a bit quirky anyway:
- Every once in a while you could shoot something and end up with negative credits. This made it pretty tricky to build up any sort of cash - I remember once getting to a space station with a negative credit balance and being unable to buy anything, even fuel!
- Encounters with Thargoids would always lead to screen corruption, and would even corrupt the console portion of the screen - and that corruption wouldn't clear until exiting the game.
- I remember once following a trader after it had left the station all the way to the system's sun - at which point it vanished. When I checked the local and galaxy map I was in a completely different system and galaxy! (I don't know if this actually supposed to happen, but I've never heard anyone else mention it).
I always put this down to my version being faulty, but now I'm not so sure. My copy was on cassette and came in a large-format plastic box, with Acornsoft and Superior Software branding. In game all the branding was Acornsoft. What's making me think something else was going on is that nobody else I've ever spoken to has encountered these problems - and I doubt that Superior would have tinkered around with working code to introduce bugs for a re-release game. So I'm thinking it might have been a combination of hardware causing these quirks.
The beeb itself was an early-ish model. I think my dad brought it home in 1983. The OS rom was never upgraded, so would have been whatever Acorn were shipping in '83. The only other non-stock thing the machine had was a rom my dad installed (I think it was called Toolkit Plus) and a Kempston joystick in BBC Micro colours.
Sadly the machine and the game are long gone, so the mystery of the 8000+ credit bounty is probably going to remain a mystery.