MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hello, I've had some troubles running certain PC Booter games on the PCXT core:

• Zork boots fine, but it fails to detect the write-only protection (as shown in the photo).
• Sid Meier's Pirates! (without copy-protection) doesn't boot at all. The same disk image does boot in DOSBox though.

Has anyone ever had the same issues?

Check the filesize, some BIOS used by PCXT can only boot the smaller 360K images

Unlikely, IIRC Zork is single sided, and Pirates! are on the 360k images (well, depends on what exactly Farsil has).

Maybe XTIDE BIOS is getting in the way.. Or those games expect BASIC... I recall there was a thread here about different BIOS options.

Actually, the copy of Pirates! I have seems to boot fine with micro8088 BIOS from BASICA directory.

Zork is indeed single-sided, and I got the Pirates! from Archive.org (two 360k disk images).

I haven't tried the micro8088 BIOS, what feature does it offer compared to the legacy BIOSes?

I was not following BASIC/XTIDE discussion earlier, but if I am not missing anything from this thread, the reason is the XTIDE incompatibility with ROM BASIC (relevant change). Hence it works for me because of the "right" version of the XTIDE BIOS extension, which is embedded into micro8088 BIOS image. I guess, it should be possible to load the correct XTIDE build with a random ROM. Sorry, cannot test it at the moment.

BTW, how to disable XTIDE altogether? Is it possible?

Thanks JamesH, that was it. I am getting now an I/O error message now unfortunately but I believe it's a different issue altogether.

Still no luck getting Zork to work.

You can uninstall XTIDE if you go to the BIOS menu, try to change the ROM file and then press Backspace at the file selection dialog. You'll have to reload your core for the changes to be effective.