XRoar "Enjoy Defender on the CoCo 3" Pico project

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wayland
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Nov 28, 2022 6:28 pm

XRoar "Enjoy Defender on the CoCo 3" Pico project

Post by wayland »

Well I have been running Glen Hewlett's emulation of the original Williams Defender game using the original ROMs in XRoar CoCo3. It's fantastic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdAvNj8HNI
https://github.com/nowhereman999/Defender_CoCo3

As a hard core Defender fanatic for over 40 years my skills have only become worse with age. Part of the problem is playing it on a keyboard rather than the full arcade panel but I solved that. I found an unfinished Defender panel on ebay and I finished it. Here's how.
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/s-l1600.jpg

I bought a kit containing a Joystick and some buttons from Amazon. There are plenty on there, I bought a fairly expensive set.
It came out looking pretty good;
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080032.JPG

I wired up the ground on all the switches.
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080033.JPG

I wired up all the switches to pins on the Raspberry Pico using Dupont cables soldered to the switches;
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080034.JPG
and
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080035.JPG

Finally I dropped the appropriate GP2040 joystick firmware on the Pico;
https://github.com/FeralAI/GP2040/tree/ ... nfigs/Pico

Now when the USB is plugged in the computer (Linux or Windows) sees an XBox style Joystick.

I used AntiMicroX on Linux (or Windows) to assign first the matching XBox controlls then matching Dragon/CoCo key presses to the ones I will also assign in Defender Config. See Glen Hewlett's video and Readme file. There was a bit of messing about to find the best pins on the Pico to plug the switches but the Dupont cables made that easy.

I am delighted with the result which really is Defender how I remember it;
Image
http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080038.JPG

The next stage will be to use a Raspberry PI running XRoar installed in my broken Dragon 32 case using the Dragon keyboard to USB I did earlier.

:geek:
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