XRoar problems with some games

[samplefiend]

Hi folks,

Wondering if anyone out there can help with a problem I'm having?

I've noticed that some games seem to have a problem when running in XRoar. I've not converted the files to wavs and tried them on my real dragon so it might just be a problem with the cas files? When trying to play Gordon Bennet and Ultrapede in XRoar v0.25.1 (and earlier versions) on Windows XP the games load fine but don't respond to any keys pressed. I've tried Ctrl + K to switch between keymaps but it doesn't make a difference, neither does disabling the joystick. Weirdly, both games load and run fine when using XRoar v0.18 Tapemangle version. I've tried using Ctrl + W to ouput the file from the Tapemangle version but they have the same problem under other versions of Xroar when loaded up too. Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance

Craig

ps i've attached the cas files of the games i mentioned

[sixxie]

Since the last release, XRoar defaults to trying to auto-detect if it should enable "leader padding" from the length of the first leader in the CAS file (trying to intelligently cope both with with short leader rips and tricky loaders that need specific timing). In the case of the Gordon Bennet image there, it has a nice long initial leader and then strange ones later... Try running xroar.exe with "-tape-pad".

Neither game seems to react well to being loaded with "CLOADM:EXEC", both preferring a simple "CLOADM". So you can't use the autorun feature either.

The old tapemangle version will be doing the equivalent of "-tape-pad" all the time. Do they actually load with CLOADM:EXEC under that one?

[samplefiend]

hi there sixxie

thanks for the extremely quick reply to my question!

you were right - both games don't like "cloadm:exec" and that's what was causing the problem. i was loading them with ctrl+shift+L so it was autorunning them. when i tried it with ctrl+L and typing cloadm both games are working fine and i didn't need to use the tapehack option either. by loading in the tapemangle version of Xroar using cloadm:exec the same problems i'd been having were present.

cheers again mate, thanks for clearing up my rookie mistakes as usual.

best wishes to all,

craig xxx

[sixxie]

Hah, it's not a mistake, just certain games need certain extra bits of knowledge. It's always good to at least include loading instructions along with an image, I think.

I quite like the idea of extending ".cas" into a format containing various other bits of metadata, like TZX: being able to represent silence, different pulse widths and stop positions (eg "end of side A") would be really useful. And you could include "BASIC commands needed to load & run". You could have chunk identifiers of $55 or $AA indicate "bog standard .cas data until end of file" for instant backwards compatibility.

In theory such a format could embed things like artwork, instructions, but I reckon stuff like that might as well be provided out of band in a .zip file - silly to complicate things for no reason.

TZX itself almost works, except the basic chunk types won't be quite what we need: they're all speccy-oriented... A shame, because MESS would already support that!