Hello,
I think that in the archive ther exist some 'anti-DOS' programs.
IIRC there is a "DOSMATE" created by Steve Evans that can be loaded from a Basic program and when executed it detaches the DOS
and calls the binary program we want to start. This program is responsible for switching to MAP1 in order to access the whole 64k
I think we have used it in some games that refused to work properly with attached disk controller and it works perfectly
cheers
pere
i still can't get that game to load.
i *think* it requires DDOS to load the other parts of the game after the boot program has disabled ddos.
so maybe only ok for single load files.
I think it is still possible to directly address the WD2797 chip after disabling DOS on a Dragon computer. I seem to remember a friend of mine creating such routines back then, so he could load pieces of code that would require the whole RAM, including the DOS memory pages. He might have done so on the "Ket Trilogy", but I'm no longer sure about this (to be checked on my previously uploaded VDKs, if that one was part of those).
[Edit] ... after checking the forum and finding the thread I had in mind, it appears this was a very different trick for "TKT" (loading the code from disk as a big chunk of raw data, disabling the DOS, then relocating the code at proper RAM locations and resetting the BASIC pointers so it would then execute as a standard BASIC program). But I know he did address the direct loading from disk after disabling the DOS, which must be somewhere in our extensive correspondence (which is several hundred pages spread over several years).
After a lot of searching...
i now know that the game disks with filename extension .64k from Pulser and P.S.E., require DISCUP from the same company.
It moves the disk workspace out of the graphics pages back to their original postion.
it comes in 3 flavours
Dragon DOS
Super DOS / Dragon DOS 4
SoftDOS
load"discup.bin"
wait for motor to stop
type EXEC
it displays a RED cursor.
insert game disk with .64k files
load"brock.64k"
EXEC &H200 will clear Discup out of memory and detach DOS