DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

A place to discuss everything Dragon related that doesn't fall into the other categories.
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

@tormod

thanks for your nice words.
Concerning the capability of going up to the root of the drive I think that this simply gives more chances to the user to have their programs wherever they would like.
But clearly there is no way of changing to another drive ...
I am one of the users that will put all of the programs, games and VDKs in folders inside the DW4 one.

cheers
pere
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

zephyr wrote:
pser1 wrote: We all have found programs / games that refuse to work properly when disks are attached.
The same will happen with DriveWire if you have the Dragon Data or any other controller working at the same time you are
connected to DW4 and load one of those games ...
I will look in my files, I am sure there must be a program (that Steve Evans uploaded) to simply disable the drives
or in a better way, using it within a litle basic program you can make it disable drives and start the game as well ...
There are three to choose from in the Uploads section.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=341

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=308

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=191
Hi, Steve

thanks a lot for linking these three versions!
I am very comfortable with DOSMATE, maybe it was the very first I tested with DWLOAD and I really love the capability to call the program / game you load after it
I will convert them to be DW4 compatible and for Dosmate I will add a Basic example of use

cheers
pere
sorchard
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by sorchard »

pser1 wrote:Have you drives in your regular Dragon set?
The short answer is no, not yet.

The long answer is yes, I've got a number of controllers and drives, but they are stored away and haven't been used in many years and need careful checking and cleaning. I would also like to get one of my 64K upgraded D32s checked out and running as I am reluctant to plug cartridges into my D64.

Once I've got disk drives working, I'll be able to use the new dweebs to quickly capture a lot of disks. Assuming I haven't left it too long of course, in which case I might need to resort to something like kryoflux...
Stew
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

Hello,

I am attaching here a binary with length adapted to DW4 named DOSMATE.BIN (one of the dos detach uploaded by Steve Evans in a previous post)
I put in the same zip a game "Chuckie.bin" that has problems when disks are attached.

cheers
pere

The best way to play without problems is using a basic program like this one:

Code: Select all

10 'HOW TO EXEC PROGRAMS THAT CONFLICT WITH D.O.S.
20 PCLEAR1
30 DLOADN"DOSMATE.BIN": 'LOADED ALWAYS FIRST
40 DLOADN"CHUCKIE.BIN": ' THE GAME YOU WANT
50 POKE&H656,&H70:POKE&H657,&H43: ' THIS IS THE EXEC ADDRESS OF THE GAME
60 EXEC&HA00: 'LAUNCHES DOSMATE AND THIS WILL START THE GAME
Attachments
DOSMATE.ZIP
Detach and Game
(8.98 KiB) Downloaded 578 times
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

Hello,

despite it seems that calling first
DLOAD"DOSMATE.BIN
and then
DLOAD"CHUCKIE.BIN

it should work, but you will see that the entry screen of the game has some moving / changing bytes in a row.
The game seems to work then, but i have not played long enough ...
This doesn't happen with the BAS file

cheers
pere
Last edited by pser1 on Wed Dec 03, 2014 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
KenH
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by KenH »

These are great dweebs.
The VLOAD & VDIR dweebs are also very useful for those without a DragonDos controller.
They allow non-dos users to access and load files from VDK disk images. It's like a zero footprint minimalist DOS.
Very cool and actually faster than running from disk!

And with Tormod's DOS dweeb that lets you boot OS9 without a disk controller I soon discovered that I hardly use my disk controller any more (except to use the FLO2V dweeb to backup old disks to VDK files).
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tormod
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by tormod »

I have made a dweeb for sending "dw" requests to the DriveWire4 server. It is like the "dw" command in NitrOS-9 or the command line in the DriveWire4 GUI. The dweeb is not perfect but I don't know when I will be fiddling more on it so take it as WIP. For instance I sometimes see every second request fails. But it works great when it works!

It is called "DW" (duh) but it also requires the "DW" keyword in the arguments. My intention was to make a general virtual channel program "VC" which takes a channel name as an argument (channel 1 would be needed for "DW") but I won't get to it that so soon.

Example:
DLOAD"DW""DW SERVER STATUS"
DLOAD"DW""DW CONFIG SHOW"

It allows you to inspect and manipulate the DriveWire4 server from your Dragon. Note that the dw commands can be shortened, like "DW SER ST".
Attachments
dw-dweeb.zip
"DW" dweeb with source.
(2.04 KiB) Downloaded 602 times
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

Hello,

I think that most of us prefer to write our Basic programs (maybe just menus) in a PC editor instead of keying right on the Dragon keyboard.
But then this file has to be sent to the Dragon ...
Well, now we can do that with the new dweeb LDA (for load ASCII)
If you use DriveWire4 as server, remember that the basic files must be padded to have a length multiple of 256 bytes (you will find a small java app at page one named Pad256 that helps doing that)

I attach here two versions of the Loader.
The first one LDA strictly calls all of the Basic routines to add each read line to the memory, it has been a bit tweaked and loads fast enough ...
Ken told me that using HDB-DOS with Drivewire loading whole Elisa.bas needed some 1m47sec and that one just needs 1m33sec

Once got it, I decided to force things as much as I could, trying to do the steps with code and bypassing operations I considered not mandatory ...
The result is the other dweeb LDAF (Load ASCII Fast)
In the source document are some notes related to its behaviour, but as you can see, the longer the program to be loaded, the better the results.
In fact, concerning Elisa.bas it is 2.5 times faster than HDB-DOS

The times lo load programs are these, upon the number of lines of the program.
Of course the number of sentences contained in every line is important, too. To make tests, I took Elisa.bas as the basis:

Code: Select all

                  LDA             LDAF
Elisa 100 lines  12 sec          11 sec
Elisa 200 lines  24 sec          18 sec
Elisa 300 lines  39 sec          25 sec
Elisa 546 lines  93 sec (1m33s)  41 sec
cheers
pere

EDIT: I forgot to mention that both dweebs accept the N parameter to just load the program without running it immediately:
DLOAD"LDA""ELISA.BAS will load and run the program
DLOAD"LDA"N"ELISA.BAS will just load it
Attachments
LDA.ZIP
Normal Load ASCII dweeb
(483 Bytes) Downloaded 584 times
LDA (LOAD ASCII).DRM.zip
Source for LDA dweeb
(3.57 KiB) Downloaded 585 times
LDAF.ZIP
Fast Load ASCII dweeb
(453 Bytes) Downloaded 584 times
LDAF (LOAD ASCII FAST).DRM.zip
Source for LDAF dweeb
(3.46 KiB) Downloaded 577 times
jedie
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by jedie »

A other way is to use my DriveWire Server: https://github.com/6809/DwLoadServer see also: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4946&p=12223#p12218 ;)
... too many ideas and too little time ... Related stuff written in Python:
Dragon 32 emulator / PyDC - Python Dragon 32 converter: https://github.com/jedie/DragonPy
DWLOAD server / Dragon-Lib and other stuff: https://github.com/6809
pser1
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Re: DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

Post by pser1 »

Hello,

the difference is that the dweebs I uploaded will work with any drivewire server, yours included, I assume.
You can try them with Aaron's DW4, with Tormod's uDW ...

cheers
pere
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