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Draco-DS - A Dragon / Tandy CoCo Emulator

  • Thread starter Thread starter wavemotion
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Been working on more color cleanup. I had assumed that 'Red' meant red - i.e. RGB of 255,0,0

But Red on the CoCo and Dragon is more a brick color. And Cyan is rather green-ish.

So I'm doing my best to try and capture the correct look. It's not easy - I tried using the exact same algorithm as XROAR emulator (been around 22 years and considered the 'gold standard') but those colors don't look quite right on the DS LCD screen.

So I'm tweaking them by hand... it's coming along.

1753880376995.png
 
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Daily build checked in at v1.4b

Added ability to swap cassettes (just like you can swap disks now).
More importantly, reworked some of the sound buffer handling to improve game sounds. Still not perfect, but better. Not that the Tandy or Dragon had much in the sound department... but we may as well get as close as we can. Did I ever mention to you guys how much I hate sound drivers :)
 
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wavemotion said:
Daily build checked in at v1.4b

Added ability to swap cassettes (just like you can swap disks now).
More importantly, reworked some of the sound buffer handling to improve game sounds. Still not perfect, but better. Not that the Tandy or Dragon had much in the sound department... but we may as well get as close as we can. Did I ever mention to you guys how much I hate sound drivers :)
Click to expand...
Are you going to include support for the Speech/Sound Pak (or Cartridge) too? A few CoCo games use it
 
https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/DracoDS

V1.5: 16-Aug-2025 by wavemotion-dave
  • Cassette Swap added to mini-menu
  • Improved in-game sound (less dropouts, fewer glitches)
  • Improvement for SG4 vs SG6 handling - WATERFALL now looks correct
  • Fixed text alternate color set (Black/Amber)
  • Fixed MUL instruction carry bit (fixes Manic Miner!)
 
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https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/DracoDS

V1.6: 05-Aug-2026 by wavemotion-dave
  • Improved accuracy on PIA handling (DDR and masking supported) - sound and keyboard reading more robust. More games read keys/joystick more correctly.
  • Massively improved .DSK and .CAS type detection and loading. Use START to load game... SELECT to run after loading.
  • Optimizations to improve emulation speed by 5-10% depending on the game. Tape loading slightly faster.
  • Dragon32 games default to Black/White vs Artifacting to reflect PAL vs NTSC.
  • Tandy Coco (NTSC) games now sync to the DS frame drawing to reduce tearing when emulating any games.
  • Lucifer's Kingdom (CoCo Port) now running correctly.
  • Katipiller II now runs correctly.
  • Shamus now runs but there is no sound.
  • Galactic Attack no longer switches into odd video mode.
  • Improved Dungeons of Daggorath key mapping.
  • Lots of cleanups and commenting as time permitted.

It's been a while on this one! Working hard this week trying to improve accuracy across the board. This is a major update with a lot more games running more correctly. Generally the system now does its best to guess what you are loading - Dragon vs Tandy and Basic vs Machine Code. 99% of the time you can just pick the game, press START to load the game into memory and SELECT to execute the game if it doesn't auto-start.

Still have a few issues I'm working through... Shamus now runs but without sound. The new Oodles homebrew freezes at the main screen. Based on a lot of debug, I think it might be the same root cause related to interrupt handling.

Anyway... no idea if anyone is using this emulator but I still like it :)
 
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