Draco-DS - Dragon 32 Handheld Emulation for the DS/DSi/XL/LL

[wavemotion]

Greetings programs! My first post - thanks for having me

I've been working on various emulators for the Nintendo DS/DSi/XL/LL handhelds over the past 5 years (something to do to pass the time when the pandemic started... and it sort of grew from there).

My latest is Draco-DS - an emulator for the Dragon 32 / Tandy CoCo 2.

draco-ds.png (21.66 KiB) Viewed 26469 times

Features :

• Tandy CoCo 2 support with 32K and 64K of RAM. Running at 60Hz NTSC.

• Dragon 32 support with 32K and 64K of RAM (see Dragon Compatibility section). Running at the 50Hz PAL speed.

• Cassette (.cas) support for both the Dragon and Tandy emulated machines.

• Cartridge (.ccc or .rom) support for both the Dragon and Tandy emulated machine.

• Disk (.dsk) support for the Tandy emulated machine. Standard single-sided 160K (35 track) or 180K (40 track) disks only.

• Save/Load Game State (one slot).

• Analog/Digital joystick selection with various sensitivity settings

• Artifacting support to 4-color high-rez mode (and the ability to swap BLUE/ORANGE on a per-game basis). PAL artifacting coming soon

• LCD Screen Swap (press and hold L+R+X during gameplay).

• LCD Screen snapshot - (press and hold L+R+Y during gameplay and the .png file will be written to the SD card).

• Virtual keyboard stylized to the machine you've picked (there is a default global machine and you can override on a per-game basis)

• Full speed, full sound and full frame-rate even on older hardware.

The intro splash screen can be configured to be the Dragon logo or the Tandy logo.

Screenshot 2025-07-30 134132.png (362.91 KiB) Viewed 26469 times

And the in-game handling will stylize the keyboard with the appropriate graphic.

Screenshot 2025-07-30 134210.png (384.21 KiB) Viewed 26469 times

I don't provide support for getting homebrew software to run on the DS/DSi... but there are lots of web pages out there to help with that. But if you happen to have an old DS/DSi laying around (they apparently sold 150 Million of these things over the years), you can find this homebrew project on my site:

https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/DracoDS

[robcfg]

Welcome to the Dragon Archive, Dave!

I've been following the progress of your SugarDS Amstrad CPC emulator at the CPCWiki, so I'm quite happy to see that you ventured into Dragon territory

I'm struggling to try your emulators as my R4 cartridge does not work, but I hope to get that solved soon.

From the instructions, I take I need to copy the rom files somewhere, where would that be?

And would it be possible to emulate the disk system on a Dragon?

Cheers,
Rob

[wavemotion]

Thanks for the welcome, Rob!

From the instructions, I take I need to copy the rom files somewhere, where would that be?

Correct - for Draco-DS, the minimum BASIC/BIOS files needed are described near the top of my github page. They must be exactly so named:

dragon32.rom
bas12.rom
extbas11.rom
disk11.rom

The last one (disk11.rom) is optional - but without it you won't be able to load .DSK files on the Tandy-side.

You can place those ROM files above in the same folder as the emulator (in this case: Draco-DS.nds) or, recommended, in the folder /roms/bios/

All of my emulators will always look in /roms/bios/ so that's a great place to stash them away.

And would it be possible to emulate the disk system on a Dragon?

It's on the list to do... I tried to start with the low-hanging fruit. For the Dragon, it seemed 90+% was on cassette. For the Tandy CoCo, it was a mix of Cassette, Cart and Disk (with most stuff eventually releasing on Disk). So that's where the initial focus went. There is only so much hobby-time and priorities have to be set.