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Something for Dragon 64 owners with disk systems to try!

http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/demo.dsk

This is my scrolling shooter demo on a BOOTable disk. Tested with SuperDOS E6, but beyond the initial BOOT, it manipulates the DOS controller directly, so should work with any.

Very short and not exactly thought out level yet, but it gets the point across that a Dragon can have a semi-decent one of these, I think.

Keys: W, S, A, D, Enter.

Also the numbers 1-7 switch in various features that might eventually be provided by powerups - 1-3 control speed, 7 enables an "option" pod, 4 clears it. 5 and 6 select two different shot speeds. Break restarts what I laughingly call a "level".

In theory hitting reset is supposed to reload the game from disk, but that doesn't seem to work on real hardware - I think I'm not resetting the controller properly.

Makes use of FAST MPU rate! I switch to it briefly each frame while copying buffers around - really contributes to the smoothness of the scroll while still letting me draw lots of sprites on screen.

No sound! Though now I have a consistent frame rate I can probably consider throwing some grunts and chirps in at least.

Edit: the .dsk file is a raw single-sided image with no header information suitable for directly dd-ing (or "rawrite"ing?) to a floppy.

I don't have a Dragon 64, but I did have a go...

The old version of MESS I used didn't support the wide addressing mode, but I did rather suspect that XRoar would.

I like the initial Galaga-like formation with loads of little sprites and the movement is smooth. Reminds me of Scramble a bit, the other bits will remain untold to convince people to try it.

Overall, I like it! It has game potential.

Thank you

What XRoar won't currently do is FAST mode properly - so what you see there isn't quite as smooth as it really is. Release soon, honest!

Edit: Here's a quick build of the current source code:

http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/da/xroar-0.2 ... dows32.zip

Thanks!

Hmm, yes, certainly smoother. Full speed, most of the time (possibly slowing when the big hill appears, or I could be imagining that).

A shame that flicking to fast mode for key moments isn't universally possible.

Thanks for sharing your latest work. I'm testing the xroar 0.23 pre-release ATM.

Nice demo!

I've updated the disk image! Scrounged some cycles back, burnt them elsewhere. New:

- Player ship and option pods changed.
- Dual boot disk - Dragon and CoCo. Probably not reliable on CoCo.
- Added some (awful?) sound effects!

No more level data yet I'm afraid - not really much closer to being an actual playable game