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Good evening everyone !

I have a silly question about the launch of Dragon 32 games in floppy format ... I do not know the command line to launch them ...

For cassettes it's then ENTER but for the floppies I tried the same command lines as for the TRS-80 Color Computer because it is very similar. Here is an example with the game Speed ​​Racer:



I type to see the exact name of the game then then ENTER... unfortunately I have an error message ?! How to proceed ?

Thanks best regards !

Hello, and welcome to the forum!

Sebiohazard,
there are two ways to run machine language programs in DragonDOS. The first, using your example of RACER.BIN, is the second, and perhaps more convenient method, is
Note that for BASIC programs (those with a .BAS extension) there is no need to include the extension and for the first method RUN is used instead of EXEC. For example, for the program RACER.BAS use either or
Furthermore, some discs are bootable. For these discs use (if you get a "?BT ERROR" then you will know that the disc is not bootable and you will have to use one of the above methods).

Hello Alastair!

Thank you very much for your precious help it's nice to talk with a specialist thanks to you I finally managed to launch Dragon games on floppy thanks again!

I had a little question always with the Speed ​​Racer game, with the XRoar emulator it starts perfectly



But with MESS unfortunately I have this screen... do you know why it does not work ?



I have a preference for the emulator MESS which gives a better graphic rendering, do you have a solution ?

Greetings !

Sebiohazard wrote: ↑Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:10 am But with MESS unfortunately I have this screen... do you know why it does not work ?

Unfortunately this looks like a bug in MAME. Does anyone have an idea as to what Speed Racer may be doing to cause this issue?

Which version of Mess are you using?

robcfg wrote: ↑Sun Nov 24, 2019 2:02 pm Which version of Mess are you using?

He has your colour improvements so must be fairly recent, I used latest git obviously.

Hello thanks for your answer !

I use MESSUI 0.213

Please note that some games require "detaching" the DOS after loading before executing them. This is because they use part of the memory pages that the DOS also uses. There are small utilities to achieve this (such as "Unboot" or "D-D") and you should find information about those somewhere else on this forum (some of my ".vdk" game disks have both).

And please note that RUNning a ".BIN" game from disk (on a real computer, not under emulation) sometimes causes the disk drive to keep going on after the game has loaded and started (this does not happen with Basic programs, though). So I would advise to load a game first, then wait for the disk drive to stop and remain silent (LED off), then and only then to start the game.

Hello snarkhunter

I did not understand what you explained... why Speed ​​Racer works well with XRoar & not with MAME ?!

Thanks best regards !

Hello,

Sebiohazard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 28, 2019 8:46 am why Speed ​​Racer works well with XRoar & not with MAME ?!

... I'd say this is because XRoar is a dedicated Dragon emulator that provides state of the art low-level emulation, whereas MAME is more general-purpose (and much older, too). Many machine-code programs will just not work - or not properly - under MAME.

Sebiohazard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 28, 2019 8:46 am I did not understand what you explained...

Sometimes, you just cannot run some software with DragonDOS running (because of conflicting memory usage) and you have to "unplug" the DOS after loading the software, but before running it. Some utility programs allow one to do so, such as "Unboot" or "D-D".