CATALOG doesn’t work! There’s nothing there!

There’s a little bug that we need to swat, but in the meantime use the short-form CAT to access the file browser.

Why can’t I LOAD a file (…after I SAVE it?)

Because of a difference between how the native Apple II and DiscoRunner process interactive commands, you need to put quotes around the filename when you execute a LOAD or a SAVE command. For example, LOAD “action/breakout” or SAVE “action/mygame”

This is crucially important with SAVE because if you omit the quotes it will save the program with the filename 0.

How do I view and edit a program?

Once you load a program into memory (likely via CAT then Control-C to stop execution) you can type XLIST to view the program source code in a syntax-highlighted viewer. Or, you can type EDIT to edit the source code.

What’s with the huge screen size?

DiscoRunner renders in 3D OpenGL, and currently doesn’t look very good at smaller sizes.

Wait, what? 3D?

Yes, 3D. You can move the camera around the graphics modes by holding down both mouse buttons (left and right) and pressing the arrow keys. Pressing both mouse buttons and space stops the movement.

I’m stuck (I can’t see a cursor, etc.)

You can “reboot” DiscoRunner by holding down both mouse buttons and pressing the END key.

The mouse orientation is backwards.

Press the scrollwheel button to reverse the orientation of the mouse.

Where are the BASIC files stored?

The library that comes with DiscoRunner is embedded in the executable, however if you SAVE a file that’s in memory, it will appear in $HOME/DiscoRunner/disk/ and you can edit it there. It will have either a .a or .i extension but these are just plain text files.

How do the controller(s) work?

DiscoRunner supports two controllers, for paddles 1 and 2, and paddles 3 and 4. Pressing button 5 switches the controllers between separate (one paddle on each stick) and combined mode (two paddles on the left stick (joystick mode) and the right stick moves the camera. Buttons 1 and 2 are the paddle buttons.

How do I switch BASIC dialects?

DiscoRunner uses the LANG command to switch dialects. Currently, DiscoRunner supports INT (for Integer BASIC) and FP (for Applesoft BASIC).

Can I run programs from a .DSK image? How do I include binary data files?

DiscoRunner runs BASIC code from plain text files only, but we do support loading binary files into memory (in particular shape tables and ML sound routines) if they are given the .s extension. We’ve been exporting the binary files from FishWings or CiderPress, then renaming them.

A few notes: you don’t add .s to the file you specify in the BLOAD DOS command, and you need to specify what address to BLOAD the file into by adding ,A and the decimal address after the file name (or it will default load to 16384) eg. PRINT CHR$(4);”BLOAD BINARY,A24536″. Also we don’t support loading HGR image files into HGR memory (because we don’t use Woz’s method to render HGR — at least, not just yet)

I have a multi-part BASIC program I’m trying to get to work in DiscoRunner and it doesn’t load the next part.

You need to change where it says PRINT CHR$(4);”RUN NEXTPART” (or equivalent) to just plain old RUN “NEXTPART”