the first Elite. Most stars also have a system of planets around them, while in the previous game there would only be a single planet and space station in every system. In addition to this some real stars had been placed in the Frontier universe, mostly near Sol, such as Alpha Centauri and Sirius. Other brighter stars such as Altair, Antares, Betelgeuse and Polaris, which are much further out, are also included. All planets and most major moons in the Sol system can also be visited. On zooming out, other galaxies are visible, although these other galaxies are simply duplicates of the first, and not accessible in any version of the game. Similarly to the original Elite, Frontier offers dozens of ships, from small but fast fighters like the Eagle, multi-role traders like the Cobra to huge cruisers such as the Anaconda or the Panther. Players may own only one ship at a time, so when a new ship is purchased, the old ship is part exchanged (i.e. traded in with most of its trade value deducted from the new ship's price). Development and release Braben originally programmed the game in 68000 assembly language. It had roughly 250,000 lines of code, which were ported from 68000 assembler to the PC's 80286 assembler by Chris Sawyer. Frontier also had some features that had never been seen before: it was the only game at the time to do a palette-fit every frame to get best use of colours, plus it also featured real sized 1:1 scale planets and star systems. Frontier: Elite II was published on a single floppy disk. For the Amiga version, this is a single 880 KB disk (disk 2 was only a selection of interesting saved games), and for the PC/DOS platform a 720 KB double density floppy. For the Amiga version, the actual executable file was only around 400 KB (uncompressed), its small size partly due to the entire game being written in assembly language while its universe was mostly procedurally generated. With a 9-year sequel gap since the original Elite in 1984, Frontier was described by CU Amiga in 1993 as "the longest-awaited sequel of the decade". The game featured a famous "wormhole" bug: Normally a ship's hyperdrive has a range of about 15 light years at most, so planetary systems dozens of light years away are too far to reach in one hyperspace jump. However,