I bought the beta version the other day. I used to play the original back 30 years ago, infact I had it installed on my pc to run under dosbox for some old nostalgia runs. Decent game so far for a beta, but expensive.
I think the first version I played was on floppy discs on an Amstrad 512 machine. It was a wire frame game at the time with some groovy midi tune. I remember the 2001 Space odyssey theme in the station docking manoeuver, until you could afford the 'auto-docking' gizmo.
Retail version of this game is out now and it's interesting to see some real astronomy techiques being applied in game. When "exploring" a system looking for planets or even the binary star I use the method of just flying around at fast speeds looking for stars that "drift" in comparison to background stars. But at least one person has taken to blink comparisons!
The game also has some nice easter eggs. One player worked out where the voyager probes would be in the year 3000 and flew the 0.15LY from earth and found a probe ingame, complete with the multilingual message that was put on the probe. link
The good news is the game is coming to consoles debuting on the XB1. I may actually get around to playing this then by the time the PS4 release is out.
I remember the 2001 Space odyssey theme in the station docking manoeuver, until you could afford the 'auto-docking' gizmo. 
