Best Pac-man game for Dragon

[retrofreak]

Going through the list of games on my "Arcade" disks, I could spot a few names that are very likely to be more Pac-Man clones, though not necessarily that "brilliant":

Cyclops
Gobbler
Mega-Bug
Pac-Tac 2
Pacdroids
Pattipak
Yellow Gobblers

... but I'm afraid you'll need to try those to find out how good they actually are!

Kind regards,
Lionel

Mmm...looks like I've got some "research" to conduct. Thanks, matey

Mmm...the only one I can find is pacdroids. Are the others lurking in the archive somewhere?

[snarkhunter]

Mmm...the only one I can find is pacdroids. Are the others lurking in the archive somewhere?

Well, I do believe you should be able to find everything in there...

[Sarah]

There was also the somewhat unusually titled Scarfman.

It had pretty crude graphics and sound but was an early example of the genre and also easier to play than some of the others. I actually remember it quite fondly as it was the first machine code game I purchased (together with Invaders Revenge) so at the time they were my initial eye-opening glance at what could be achieved by going beyond the limitations and slow speed of BASIC!

[briza]

randomrodder's site has a few collections, I just remembered: http://tandycoco.com/rsdos.html

I'm not sure how well sorted or annotated any of it is.

ftp://os9archive.rtsi.com/ has been around for a while, but most of the fun stuff is under the "incoming" subdirs, and that definitely isn't well categorised.

I've ripped most of my CoCo tapes and transcribed instructions here: http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/coco_originals/ (individual instructions files here: http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/coco_instructions/), but that's a small selection.

Yeah in Rodders section you will find my Games collection, which you will come across quite a few Pac-man versions done on the Coco range.

Sixxie, Do you think you could ever get the imgtool application program found in the MESS emulator apps to work on Dragon VDk images, If you could get it working on Dragon images we could easily get Bin files on coco dsk images onto Dragon VDk images and vice versa, As I can easily get Bin files on coco images to a BIN FILE on their own, only need a program similar to FILE2DSK created to make VDK images

Let me know if it is possible Sixxie

laters

Briza

[rolfmichelsen]

Sixxie, Do you think you could ever get the imgtool application program found in the MESS emulator apps to work on Dragon VDk images, If you could get it working on Dragon images we could easily get Bin files on coco dsk images onto Dragon VDk images and vice versa, As I can easily get Bin files on coco images to a BIN FILE on their own, only need a program similar to FILE2DSK created to make VDK images

See this post for a tool that might just do the trick. Alternatively, you can also make the CoCo images available, and I'll give it a shot to convert them to Dragon VDK images.

-- Rolf

[briza]

Sixxie, Do you think you could ever get the imgtool application program found in the MESS emulator apps to work on Dragon VDk images, If you could get it working on Dragon images we could easily get Bin files on coco dsk images onto Dragon VDk images and vice versa, As I can easily get Bin files on coco images to a BIN FILE on their own, only need a program similar to FILE2DSK created to make VDK images

See this post for a tool that might just do the trick. Alternatively, you can also make the CoCo images available, and I'll give it a shot to convert them to Dragon VDK images.

-- Rolf

HI Rolf.

I just downloaded your toolkit, By the sounds of it it just may do the trick to get Bin files back and forth between the Dragon and Coco range
There is one game in the coco collection of mine which i would love to see running on the Dragon and that's Kung FU Dude, If your tools work it just may be possible to do it

As for my games collection I have no access to them at all, But you can always download them from my Mates coco website if you like

http://tandycoco.com/rsdos.html

Look for Briza's collection

laters

Briza

[rolfmichelsen]

Found it. I'll give the conversion a shot.

-- Rolf

[briza]

Found it. I'll give the conversion a shot.

-- Rolf

Thanks Rolf. Hopefully your tools can do the trick.

Btw Rolf, what windows system does your Toolkit run under? XP, Win7, Vista ? And it only can be executed from the Command prompt ? Or does it have a GUI interface menu?

laters

Briza

[rolfmichelsen]

Briza,

The tools should run on any Windows version where the .NET 4 framework is installed. I am primarily testing on Windows 7. Currently, this stuff is highly experimental and only a single command line utility is provided. I'll get around to some GUI programming once I get the time.

As this is still experimental and the RSDOS support hasn't seen too much testing, I found one bug and identified a missing feature before I can do the conversion. Nothing bit. I hope to get around to fixing this in a matter of days.

-- Rolf

[rolfmichelsen]

Days quickly becomes weeks, but here's an update on how this mini-project is going. Not being a CoCo expert, I learned a lot of new stuff when actually starting to parse RSDOS filesystems... The RSDOS way of storing machine code programs is way more flexible than DragonDos, so a simple 1:1 conversion is not possible. I converted the file "KUNGFU.BIN" from the diskette named "kungdude.dsk", assuming that this is the file you are looking for.

The resulting DragonDos disk image is in the attached file. The disk contains 6 files, corresponding to the 6 "segments" constituting the CoCo program file. Each file loads as a machine code program despite the somewhat unorthodox naming.

SEGMENT.1 loads at address 1024 (this is the loading screen)
SEGMENT.2 loads at address 3584
SEGMENT.3 loads at address 359
SEGMENT.4 loads at address 512
SEGMENT.5 loads at address 544
SEGMENT.6 loads at address 2380
Program execution should start at address 3584, based on meta-data from the CoCo file. I haven't yet studied the content of segments 3-5 to see whether they actually trigger execution at some other address.

Simply doing LOAD "SEGMENT.2"; exec 3584 doesn't work, and I haven't yet figured out how to run this program or whether it will run at all on the Dragon. Next step is to look at what tricks are played with segments 3-6.

In the meantime, enjoy the loading screen by doing LOAD "SEGMENT.1"

-- Rolf