I played the C64 version a while ago and it really hasn't aged well. If you want to play it (again) you should go straight with the MSDOS (plus) version.
Well, Archie or Amiga versions might be worth a look. Bell does say "regarded by many as the best ever version" about the Archie version on the page: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/game.htm
Though I was on an Amiga (and the then-poor PC with CGA or EGA in school, bleh), have never tried the Archie version:
There's also Frontier: Elite II. By that stage, high-end PCs were beginning to outperform low-end Amigas at some brute-force processing tasks including software 3D rendering, so the graphics are arguably better on the PC version (limited texture mapping, edit - though OTOH it sort of looks out of place looking at it now, the amiga version with no textures is more consistent and clean visually if perhaps less technically impressive), you needed a pretty-much PC-priced-anyway high-end/accelerated Amiga model to run at the frame rate shown in the video:
The Commodore 64 was my first home computer, and Elite was hands-down one of the jewels on that platform when it came out. Yes, it hasn't aged well....but when it was new, it was breathtaking.
