Ring of Darkness - multi stage load

[alan]

Hey guys.....

I've tried XRoar and MESS emulators to play Ring of Darkness, however i keep having problems with the multi stage load. it appears that the cassette motor on/off functionality doesn't seem to work for me....

Am i doing something wrong or should i be using something else ?

fanks !
A

[Alastair]

Let's see.

I believe that when these emulators encounter the cassette motor on instruction all that the emulators do is 'play' the cassette image that has been loaded, there is no rewind/fast-forward function. Under XRoar, and probably MESS, the simple act of re-loading the cassette image rewinds the image.

So, whenever a game switches on the cassette motor and tells you to rewind the cassette just skip that stage, and after skipping that stage re-load the cassette image.

[alan]

thank you, I'll give it a try.

Does anyone know if there is a disk version of ROD ?

Cheers
A

[snarkhunter]

Does anyone know if there is a disk version of ROD ?

I seriously doubt it...
Just take a look at the program's list (written in Basic), and you'll soon find out how big it is. Given the use of PMODE3/4 graphics (i.e. another 6 KB off the available memory) for the main map and the cities & mazes, there would be no room left for disk management routines (and don't forget the DOS itself requires an extra 1.5 KB). Achieving this would have taken completely rewriting the game to split it into many more parts that could have been loaded in turn. But this wasn't an actual issue at the time the game was released, since disk drives were still scarce among Dragon owners.

Later on, more games were developped in m/c, which sure was a huge improvement on memory requirements, and would also allow either better/faster graphics, or larger game maps. But, except for professional software, very few people ever cared about writing disk-oriented programs.

The only exception that I know of still has to be the French RPG game called "Graal Quest", which is disk-based. I have it onto one of my VDKs, but never actually played it, having received it when I was already on the verge of becoming a former Dragon user...

I remember converting some of my own software to run from disk, and it proved quite tricky sometimes (memory shortage, etc) : 32 KB weren't that much, especially after allocating a fair part of those to the DOS and/or graphics.

The disk versions of "Telewriter" and "Alldream" were good examples of very clever programming.

And please note that all of the above should be considered "IMHO" stuff !