archive.worldofdragon.org

Hi there.

Dusted down my old Dragon 32 a few weeks ago and thought I'd have a go at doing something with it.
After trawling the Net I came upon this forum which, pleasantly surprising to find, it is quite active;
so here's hoping you may be able to help me get Xroar to work.

First some specs:
PC OS: Windows XP 32bit SP3, with all latest updates.
Xroar version "xroar-0.29.5-w32".

Now I've RTFM - a few times - but still can't get Xroar to work.
I'm not to sure if I'm using the correct ROM or not, or if I have it in the correct directory,
but I've tried a few of the BASIC ROMs from the download section and get a different result
from each of the BASIC ROMs.

The ROMs have been put in the location
"C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\ApplicationData\XRoar\roms,
where USERNAME is my Username, as recommended in the Xroar manual.

Here are the symptoms (depending on which DOS is used):
Note: when referring to "screen" this is the emulated window that pops up.

1) Screen is checkered pattern with red squares and "@" symbols.
2) Screen fills with random characters - then screen slowly fills with "@" symbols.
3) Screen fills with blocky characters - then screen scrolls with two lines of blocks.

Here is a sample of some of the commands used and there results:

1) "xroar -romlist-print" Command line prompt shown, no ROM list is shown.
2) "xroar -machine help" Command line prompt shown, no help is shown (none of the 'help' options work).
3) "xroar -machine dragon32" Checkered screen shown.
4) "xroar -load DOSNAME.rom" checkered screen shown.

Any help would be most appreciated as it's driving me crazy - how difficult can it be !,

Many thanks.

davidbowman wrote:here's hoping you may be able to help me get Xroar to work.

First some specs:
PC OS: Windows XP 32bit SP3, with all latest updates.
Xroar version "xroar-0.29.5-w32".

Hi. Author of it here! But my first disclaimer is I don't actually have a Windows system - the Windows build is effectively a 'port', so suffers a little from not quite being written with it in mind.

The ROMs have been put in the location
"C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\ApplicationData\XRoar\roms,
where USERNAME is my Username, as recommended in the Xroar manual.

That looks ok, except for the lack of a space between "Application" and "Data". What it comes down to is how much of that path did you have to create yourself? Most of it, right down to "Application Data" should exist somewhere on your disk already as your user profile directory.

Here is a sample of some of the commands used and there results:

1) "xroar -romlist-print" Command line prompt shown, no ROM list is shown.
2) "xroar -machine help" Command line prompt shown, no help is shown (none of the 'help' options work).
3) "xroar -machine dragon32" Checkered screen shown.
4) "xroar -load DOSNAME.rom" checkered screen shown.

Because the Windows build is a port, it does some crazy things with the standard output. On a Unix system, stdout is stdout and stderr is stderr, and users are kinda expected to know what to do with it. I think the writers of SDL (the graphical toolkit that XRoar uses) expected that Windows users prefer to click on a .exe (meaning standard output wouldn't have anywhere to go), so it sends all that output to special files - stdout.txt and stderr.txt - try looking for those in the directory you ran the .exe from!

Any help would be most appreciated as it's driving me crazy - how difficult can it be !,

Often far more difficult than anything should be

At least you don't have the OpenGL issue a lot of people have had with recent Windows releases - drivers not supporting even pretty basic stuff, and they can't even see the checkered "I couldn't find a BASIC ROM" pattern...

If the path suggestion above didn't help isolate it, maybe you can try locating the std*.txt files mentioned and paste them here. Also, try opening a command.com (cmd.exe?) window and typing "echo %USERPROFILE" and "echo %HOME" and giving us the output, that might help narrow things down too. At least I think that's what you'd type to see those variables - damn, it's been a long time since I did anything more than "ipconfig /all" in a DOS window on a user's machine!

I have been running xroar under various versions of Windows. I've always put the ROM files in the same directory as the rest of the xroar distribution. Works like a charm for me. Here's the list of files in my xroar directory.

ChangeLog
COPYING.GPL
COPYING.LGPL-2.1
d32.ROM
d64_1.ROM
d64_2.ROM
ddos10.rom
libsndfile-1.dll
README
SDL.dll
sdose6.ROM
xroar.exe
xroar.pdf

-- Rolf

The ROMs have been put in the location
"C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\ApplicationData\XRoar\roms,
where USERNAME is my Username, as recommended in the Xroar manual.

That looks ok, except for the lack of a space between "Application" and "Data". What it comes down to is how much of that path did you have to create yourself? Most of it, right down to "Application Data" should exist somewhere on your disk already as your user profile directory.

Thanks for the reply sixxie.

The missing space between "Application" and "Data" is a typo on my behalf, the full path
"C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data" was already there, I just had to add
the "\XRoar\roms" part.

Here is the stderr.txt.

Module init: SDL UI
Module init: Windows32 file requester
Module init: SDL OpenGL video
Module init: SDL audio
8-bit unsigned, mono, 44100Hz
23ms (1024 samples) buffer
Module init: SDL keyboard input
Module init: SDL joystick input
No joysticks found
Module init failed: SDL joystick input
WARNING: No joystick module initialised.
Machine: Dragon 64
Cartridge: DragonDOS
Loading ROM: C:\Documents and Settings\Spooky/Application Data/XRoar/roms/Dragon Data Ltd - DragonDOS 1.0.rom

An (empty) stdout.txt file is created whilst the emulator window is open and it is
automatically deleted when the emulator is closed down.

Typing "echo %USERPROFILE" returns the message "%userprofile" and typing "echo %HOME"
returns the message "%home".

If I type "echo %USERPROFILE%" (note the extra %) this returns the message "C:\Documents and
Settings\Spooky"
If I type "echo %HOME%" (note the extra %) it returns the message "%home%".

Hope this is of some help.

Thanks again.

rolfmichelsen wrote:I have been running xroar under various versions of Windows. I've always put the ROM files in the same directory as the rest of the xroar distribution. Works like a charm for me. Here's the list of files in my xroar directory.

ChangeLog
COPYING.GPL
COPYING.LGPL-2.1
d32.ROM
d64_1.ROM
d64_2.ROM
ddos10.rom
libsndfile-1.dll
README
SDL.dll
sdose6.ROM
xroar.exe
xroar.pdf

-- Rolf

These are the same files (except the ROM files) that I have.
I've tried putting the ROM file(s) in this directory, and in some other directories, but just get the same failed results.

P.S.
I've tried XRoar in Windows 7 32bit laptop and get the same failed results - I'll reboot into Windows 7 64bit (this is a nice clean'ish install) and try it there.

dB.

davidbowman wrote: Loading ROM: C:\Documents and Settings\Spooky/Application Data/XRoar/roms/Dragon Data Ltd - DragonDOS 1.0.rom

Ok this demonstrates it's able to find ROMs at all. I think we need to see a directory listing - XRoar searches for files with particular names (e.g., "d64_1.rom" and "d64_2.rom"), and while I've tried to account for all the filenames commonly found in ROM distributions on the web, it's still possible I've missed something. Include extensions!

And in the meantime if you can run xroar.exe from the command line, try adding "-extbas some-basic-rom-filename-you-know-exists" as an option.

If I type "echo %USERPROFILE%" (note the extra %) this returns the message "C:\Documents and
Settings\Spooky"

Hah, told you it had been a while. There was a vague suspicion at the back of my mind that it needed that enclosing '%', but I wasn't sure...

sixxie wrote:

davidbowman wrote: Loading ROM: C:\Documents and Settings\Spooky/Application Data/XRoar/roms/Dragon Data Ltd - DragonDOS 1.0.rom

Ok this demonstrates it's able to find ROMs at all. I think we need to see a directory listing - XRoar searches for files with particular names (e.g., "d64_1.rom" and "d64_2.rom"), and while I've tried to account for all the filenames commonly found in ROM distributions on the web, it's still possible I've missed something. Include extensions!

OK, some good news.
Story so far.. I've tried, in command line, using files names as suggested in the manual, e.g. "d32.rom", (also tried with the files names as downloaded), with or without extensions and it did not work (this was with the few DOS ROMs I tried from the download section), but..

I downloaded d64_1.rom and d32.rom from here http://nitroroms.com/search/All/dragon%2032/page-1 and both these ROMs worked.
It did not matter if the ROMs were in the "C:\Documents..." path or in the root with xroar.exe, both locations worked, I made sure the ROMs were not in both paths at the same time.
Now all I have to do is figure out how the rest of it works.

Again, many thanks for the help and, no doubt, I'll probably be back asking for more.

Try these ROM images.

zephyr wrote:Try these ROM images.

Thanks for the link. Some of the ROMs work for me and some don't (I'm probably doing something wrong).
The d32.rom works and that's fine as I can run Alldream and refresh my very faded assembly language knowledge.
I've Alldream running on my Dragon32 but some of the keys need a good whacking to respond, so doing it on a PC
will be a lot less frustrating.

dB.

davidbowman wrote: Thanks for the link. Some of the ROMs work for me and some don't (I'm probably doing something wrong).

All of the ROMs work perfectly on my PC with XROAR running on Windows XP Pro. Just out of interest; does this "ready to go" installation of XROAR work OK on your machine?