The SnarkHunter Disks

[zephyr]

Thank you very much for this, Steve. But how did you do it?!

I used MESS to print them to text file via Dragon 32 emulation.

[snarkhunter]

... perhaps Salamander compiled the BASIC program before releasing the game? The same could also be true of Fishy Business (also included in the zip).

Just load any "CLOADM" game from Salamander, then try to play it for a couple of minutes, and you'll be convinced it cannot be the case by any means: the display updates are way too slow and "jerky", which tells for sure it's only BASIC running. It only took disabling the BREAK key to have people think they had purchased some genuine m/c software!

[Alastair]

... perhaps Salamander compiled the BASIC program before releasing the game? The same could also be true of Fishy Business (also included in the zip).

Just load any "CLOADM" game from Salamander, then try to play it for a couple of minutes, and you'll be convinced it cannot be the case by any means: the display updates are way too slow and "jerky", which tells for sure it's only BASIC running. It only took disabling the BREAK key to have people think they had purchased some genuine m/c software!

After I read Steve's comment ("Its not compiled, just saved as one chunk of memory with a small machine code autorun routine.") I realised that I should have known that they were not compiled, as you say, the give-away is a distinct lack of speed.

[zephyr]

By the way, I'm now doubting it can actually be useful to anyone (... unless one should be willing to check the code?!). That is, until someone comes with a Dragon/PC text interfacing tool: would there happen to be any such tool available already?

I have just discovered an MS-DOS program (DRM2TXT) at Graham Kinn's Dragon site which directly converts DOSDream/DSKDream assembler .drm files to plain text.

http://dragon32.info/pc/

[Alastair]

Postscript on The White Cliffs of Dover.

Issue 4 of Dragon Update (see http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index.php?title=Update_Issue_4_(Dec)) states that Salamander were selling the game by mail order, so was it released after all?