How to?

[Julian]

Hi,

I'm a dragon user of many years (and many years ago) and I'm in the process of rediscovering all the fun I used to have. At the time I had to make do without any of the fancier elements of using a computer, although I did have the benefit of having two computers which accelerated development of my endeavours greatly. Now with emulators making everything almost instantaneous the slow cycle of build - run - debug is gone but it is still very inconvenient thanks to the limits of emulating cassettes. Snapshots seem to make things much easier but you still have to bootstrap an image at some point...

Back to my question then - I'm trying to configure an emulator to use one of the DOS roms and work from there but so far I just can't get any additional roms to work, so has anyone got a simple guide on how to get it working. It is really driving me nuts.

For now I am just prototyping code by simulating 6809 machine language in vb while I get my whits about me (it has been over 20 years since I did any 6809 coding). Although that does lead me to another question - has anyone had much luck cross-assembling code? It seems to be a much less painful approach but I'm struggling with how to get compiled code into the right format for loading.

I think I'll have to dig out my old hardware as well - no idea where I'll put it of course, even assuming it still works...

[Alastair]

If the emulator you are using is XRoar then where you put the ROMs depends on the platform you use. In Windows the ROMs can go in the same directory as xroar.exe for other platforms see http://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/xroar-man ... stallation.

I'm no expert in cross-compiling but the topic has cropped up in these forums. Though I cannot point you to most of the threads both viewtopic.php?f=8&t=347 (scroll down to after my post) and viewtopic.php?f=8&t=385 may be of interest.

[Julian]

The manual is rather obtuse unfortunately but I have had some success with xroar. I can see the roms are getting loaded but it never seems to do anything with them. Using the dragon dos 1.0 rom as a starting point, the rom is listed as loaded in the stderr but the extended command set doesn't work, this is the essence of what is causing me grief....

[robcfg]

Be sure to rename the roms to their correct names (i.e. D64_1.rom and D64_2.rom for the Dragon64 roms), and put it besides the Xroar executable file.

[zephyr]

My XROAR starter kit is the quickest way to get started if your OS is MS Windows.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=184

[Julian]

Thank you so much! I managed to get DragonDos1 to boot through Mess last night but it kept crashing out whenever I tried reading any disks and it wouldn't always boot for some bizarre reason that I couldn't identify. Hopefully this will be a bit more reliable

Out of curiosity what are you doing with each of those bootstrap executables? Can you pass extra command line parameters through them?

[Julian]

No matter - a few minutes with a hex editor extracted all of the command line parameters being used.

It *was* the rom filenames that was causing me trouble but only the file extensions (.dgn instead of .rom)

[robcfg]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the .dgn files do have a small header and then the rom data, while the .rom files are raw binary dumps. So I can imagine MESS trying to read past the actual file length.

Glad you managed to solve it!

[zephyr]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the .dgn files do have a small header

That's correct.

No matter - a few minutes with a hex editor extracted all of the command line parameters being used.

It *was* the rom filenames that was causing me trouble but only the file extensions (.dgn instead of .rom)

Here's an example of some basic command line parameters:

Examples with DOS emulation disabled.

Dragon 32
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon32 -extbas d32.rom -nodos -kbd-translate

Dragon 32 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon32 -extbas d32.rom -nodos -ram 64 -kbd-translate

Dragon 64
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64rom1.rom -nodos -kbd-translate

Dragon 64 (Later Motherboards)
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64tano.rom -nodos -kbd-translate

Dragon 64 by Tano
xroar -vo sdl -machine tano -extbas d64tano.rom -nodos -kbd-translate

Dragon 200
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64tano.rom -nodos -kbd-translate

CoCo (Early model with 4K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas bas10.rom -noextbas -nodos -ram 4 -no-tape-fast -kbd-translate

CoCo with extended BASIC (32K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas bas11.rom -extbas extbas10.rom -nodos -ram 32 -kbd-translate

CoCo 2 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas bas12.rom -extbas extbas11.rom -nodos -ram 64 -kbd-translate

Prologica CP-400 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas cp400bas.rom -extbas cp400extbas.rom -nodos -ram 64 -kbd-translate


Examples with DOS emulation enabled.

Dragon 32
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon32 -extbas d32.rom -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

Dragon 32 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon32 -extbas d32.rom -ram 64 -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

Dragon 64
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64rom1.rom -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

Dragon 64 (Later Motherboards)
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64tano.rom -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

Dragon 64 by Tano
xroar -vo sdl -machine tano -extbas d64tano.rom -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

Dragon 200
xroar -vo sdl -machine dragon64 -extbas d64tano.rom -dos ddos10.rom -kbd-translate

CoCo with extended BASIC (32K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas bas11.rom -extbas extbas10.rom -dos disk11.rom -ram 32 -kbd-translate

CoCo 2 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas bas12.rom -extbas extbas11.rom -dos disk11.rom -ram 64 -kbd-translate

Prologica CP-400 (64K RAM)
xroar -vo sdl -machine cocous -bas cp400bas.rom -extbas cp400extbas.rom -cart rsdos -dos cp400dsk.rom -ram 64 -kbd-translate


NOTE: Pressing Ctrl+F toggles between full screen and windowed mode.

[Julian]

What I haven't figured out is why other rom images aren't working when I load them