Draco-DS - A Dragon / Tandy CoCo Emulator

[wavemotion]

some coco games stop loading with "S" left top screen, whats this means ?

Could be you're loading a machine code game as a BASIC game or the reverse. CLOAD vs CLOADM

Or the wrong machine type... Tandy CoCo vs Dragon32.

 

[wavemotion]

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.

 

[wavemotion]

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

V1.4: 31-July-2025 by wavemotion-dave

• Improved DS color palette for better accuracy.
• Fixed auto-fire joystick handling.
• Improved color mode (1C, 2C, 3C and 6C) rendering and speed.
• Improved green artifacting mode color.
• New Dragon 32 splash screen

 

[wavemotion]

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

 

[Cris1997XX]

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

Are you going to include support for the Speech/Sound Pak (or Cartridge) too? A few CoCo games use it

 

[wavemotion]

Are you going to include support for the Speech/Sound Pak (or Cartridge) too? A few CoCo games use it

Probably not. I’m hopeful to never have to write another sound driver ever again.

 

[wavemotion]

Just toying around with some tangentially related ideas...

Been working on converting the Motorola MC6809 CPU driver into an MC6803 driver which is tricker than I first thought...

 

[wavemotion]

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!)