XRoar is an emulator for the Dragon and Tandy computers. The Dragon and Tandy
are eight bit home computers based on the 6809 CPU. Initially produced in Wales
in early 1980ies, later they spawned some variants in other countries as well.
Even if using very powerful processor - the eight bit smaller brother of the
Motorola highly successful 16/32 bit 68000 and 68008 family, the lack of good
peripherals, non quality software and small userbase, made the computer
unpopular despite being with reasonable specifications for the period it was
introduced. Nevertheless with XRoar you can experience the Dragon and Coco
computers and tinker with the software available for them.
The Amiga version uses ASL filerequester for the selection of the virtual
diskettes, cassettes or cartridges. There are 3 videomodes available for
selection. The YUV overlay video output mode displays on resizeable window,
which can be used directly on Workbench. The emulator supports Joystick via
AmigaInput, have sound output and recognizes several formats for diskette
images, snapshots and tapes. XRoar is new development, it is frequently updated
and is already available for GP32, Nintendo Dual Screen, Linux and PSP. The
Amiga version contributes to its wide availability on different platforms.
Because of legal reasons, the original firmware ROM images are not included in
the archive, but only a freeware replacement with very limited functionality.
The replacement gives the possibility to load software, without the need of
original firmware ROM image files. If you don't have any firmware images, you
may like to try this one. It doesn't do anything beyond trying to boot OS9
(Dragon version), and only a few cartridge images work with it (mostly CoCo
software - Dragon carts seem to always contain many more direct jumps into ROM).
If you do have images, but want to try this one anyway, save it out and use
"-extbas FILENAME" to load it instead of the normal Dragon 64 image.
----Popular software titles for the Dragon computers include games
Manic Miner,
Frogger,
Chuckie Egg,
Jet Set Willy,
Donkey Kong,
Cassette 50,
-----operating systems
OS9,
Dragon DOS,
-----productivity software Dragon Graphic Studio, File Master, Rainbow Writer,
6809 editor assembler.
There is software for Dragon written by me, available in the Others section.
Even if not being that popular, the XRoar emulator provides Dragon emulation
with enhanced functionality compared to the other Dragon emulators for Amiga.
The emulator gives great entertainment for the people to enjoy one more of the
retro computers and the software written for them.
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