Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

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Pernod70
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Re: Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

Post by Pernod70 »

snarkhunter wrote: Thu Jan 02, 2020 2:33 pm 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).
If someone can determine why it's failing in MAME then I'd be happy to fix it!

MAME has clearly been around much longer than XRoar, but to say it's older is unfair as it has monthly releases and the code base is continually modernised to keep up with the latest coding standards.
snarkhunter wrote: Thu Jan 02, 2020 2:33 pm Many machine-code programs will just not work - or not properly - under MAME.
This is rather harsh and not true! The Dragon driver is considered working, so if there's an issue it needs identifying and reporting so that it can be corrected.
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snarkhunter
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Re: Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

Post by snarkhunter »

Pernod70 wrote: Thu Jan 02, 2020 3:14 pm
snarkhunter wrote: Thu Jan 02, 2020 2:33 pm Many machine-code programs will just not work - or not properly - under MAME.
This is rather harsh and not true! The Dragon driver is considered working, so if there's an issue it needs identifying and reporting so that it can be corrected.
Sorry, I did not mean to offend anyone here.
This statement was only based on my own memories of trying to run a number of games under MESS Dragon emulation and getting it to crash very often, with or without soft-detaching the DOS first.

I do not use Dragon emulation a lot these days, so I do not know how far MESS actually got over the last years. The version I last used is also likely to be quite old by today's standards, so please accept my apologies.

Still... XRoar is a dedicated Dragon emulation, and pretty amazing at what it does.

Lionel
sixxie
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Re: Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

Post by sixxie »

MESS/MAME is just big. It has admirable goals...

I'd have used MESS "back in the day" if a) it had stood a chance of running full-speed Dragon emulation on a GP32 or indeed an UltraSPARC Solaris desktop machine, and b) I'd stood a chance of understanding its architecture in the time available to me.

So XRoar handles some things better because I am lazy and stupid. Too lazy to optimise MAME for a target, too stupid to understand what's in front of me. If I or others have behavioural observations it is far easier for me to bolt them into code I already understand. Oh, and MESS's licensing worried me at the time, I think, though I can't remember why. Also, writing it from scratch was fun.

XRoar's code is just as badly documented - if not more so - than MAME's :)

As for Speed Racer, nothing comes to mind - MAME will already have all the illegal instructions and what-not. The only thing I can think of that's been a consistent unaddressed problem in MAME[*] is the timing of the PAL machines - is it possible something is depending on that? Oh, and PAL machines used to still default to NTSC artefact colours, but that's not going to be causing this...

..ciaran

[*] I've not tried updating for a few months, things change all the time, this might be a non-issue now
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robcfg
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Re: Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

Post by robcfg »

As you say, I doubt it’s the artifacting and, on top of that, I fixed the artifacting issue and added the proper pal color blending to Mame.

One thing that worries me though is that in later versions of Mame, I cannot load tapes with machine code programs as they just stop loading...

Nigel, is that known or should I report it on MameTesters?
Pernod70
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Re: Launching Dragon 32 games in floppy format ?!

Post by Pernod70 »

robcfg wrote: Fri Jan 03, 2020 10:21 am One thing that worries me though is that in later versions of Mame, I cannot load tapes with machine code programs as they just stop loading...

Nigel, is that known or should I report it on MameTesters?
I wasn't aware of that, cas or wav? This reminds me that extended cas is still not implemented. Post an example to the MAME emulation thread and I'll take a look.
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