Yes, no hardware timers are used in NES Elite, as there aren't any.
Instead there's an NMI counter (nmiTimer) that counts every VBlank and wraps around every 50 ticks, so it's effectively a seconds counter on the 50Hz PAL version. And in the NMI handler, they keep a running total of cycles spent so they know when VBlank has finished and can stop sending data to the PPU, picking up where they left off in the next VBlank (see the NMI routine in bank 7).
They also use sprite 0 collision detection to flag when the screen redraw has reached the icon bar, so it can force the PPU to nametable and pattern table 0 (as the icon bar's tiles are only in table 0, with table 1 being used for the vector graphics). This is not unlike the original BBC Micro version's split-screen mode, just without any hardware timers (instead, the whole source is littered with macros that check the collision flag - not very elegant, but it works).
Having hardware timers would have made things a lot easier!
Instead there's an NMI counter (nmiTimer) that counts every VBlank and wraps around every 50 ticks, so it's effectively a seconds counter on the 50Hz PAL version. And in the NMI handler, they keep a running total of cycles spent so they know when VBlank has finished and can stop sending data to the PPU, picking up where they left off in the next VBlank (see the NMI routine in bank 7).
They also use sprite 0 collision detection to flag when the screen redraw has reached the icon bar, so it can force the PPU to nametable and pattern table 0 (as the icon bar's tiles are only in table 0, with table 1 being used for the vector graphics). This is not unlike the original BBC Micro version's split-screen mode, just without any hardware timers (instead, the whole source is littered with macros that check the collision flag - not very elegant, but it works).
Having hardware timers would have made things a lot easier!