archive.worldofdragon.org

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.

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;

http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080032.JPG

I wired up the ground on all the switches.

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;

http://www.gadgetmax.co.uk/dragon/defender/P1080034.JPG
and

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;

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.

That's pretty cool, but for an even more authentic experience you could hook your control panel up to MiSTer and run the Defender core.

Hell it might even be possible to play Defender on MiSTer's CoCo3 core as well!?!

Huh, thanks (tcdev) for the thread necromancy there as I'd completely missed this post, and that looks excellent!

Next you (wayland) need to interface that to a real CoCo 3 Just a shame they use that horrible flimsy mylar for the keyboard connector...