The Dragon32 Snapshot Cassette Program (TM)
Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2013 3:38 pm
Hi all,
Since I got the superIDE working on my Tano Dragon, I noticed that very few games have been converted from cassette to floppies and in all cases they miss the splash screens (conflict with DOS area) and some like batck track have graphics corruptions. So I decided to move and make myselft my conversions. Since most of the cassettes have all copy protection mechanism I created a new techinque that seems to work very well:
http://youtu.be/p59rt9sPfWs
Using the M.E.S.S. emulator I can create a snapshot of the very first instruction being executed after the cassette finishes to load. Then I export this snapshot (48K) and using my special loader mix in ML and Basic I can load the entire snapshot to RAM and make the coco behave just like it was a Dragon32 and the game RUNS!
.
The game can be loaded from RS-DOS floppies, HDB-DOS (superIDE) and DriveWire (but it must be DW from ROM, not RAM)
I converted so far 4 games (it takes me 5 to 10 minutes per game) but I still deciding some technical details. Notice the conversion is perfect with preserved splash screens and no corrupted graphics. I converted moon cresta, back track, cosmic trooper and kamacarzy.
I think the basic loader can be easily ported to Dragon SuperDOS but I don't have a FDC for my Dragon and the Dragon vdk disks are a bit hard to handle. The loader is mix on basic and ML so the basic part must be converted to superdos.
It also runs on a coco3, but not all games of course. And the coco3 is more sensible to dragon roms. The ideia is to use a coco1/2 for the job or a real dragon32 with DW or SuperIDE from running from ROM.
Since I got the superIDE working on my Tano Dragon, I noticed that very few games have been converted from cassette to floppies and in all cases they miss the splash screens (conflict with DOS area) and some like batck track have graphics corruptions. So I decided to move and make myselft my conversions. Since most of the cassettes have all copy protection mechanism I created a new techinque that seems to work very well:
http://youtu.be/p59rt9sPfWs
Using the M.E.S.S. emulator I can create a snapshot of the very first instruction being executed after the cassette finishes to load. Then I export this snapshot (48K) and using my special loader mix in ML and Basic I can load the entire snapshot to RAM and make the coco behave just like it was a Dragon32 and the game RUNS!
. The game can be loaded from RS-DOS floppies, HDB-DOS (superIDE) and DriveWire (but it must be DW from ROM, not RAM)
I converted so far 4 games (it takes me 5 to 10 minutes per game) but I still deciding some technical details. Notice the conversion is perfect with preserved splash screens and no corrupted graphics. I converted moon cresta, back track, cosmic trooper and kamacarzy.
I think the basic loader can be easily ported to Dragon SuperDOS but I don't have a FDC for my Dragon and the Dragon vdk disks are a bit hard to handle. The loader is mix on basic and ML so the basic part must be converted to superdos.
It also runs on a coco3, but not all games of course. And the coco3 is more sensible to dragon roms. The ideia is to use a coco1/2 for the job or a real dragon32 with DW or SuperIDE from running from ROM.