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MSX2DAAD Wiki: Using DRC

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nataliapc edited this page Dec 14, 2019 · 4 revisions

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About DRC

DRC is the new DAAD compiler. DRC stands for "DAAD Reborn Compiler" and it has two parts:

  • DRF: The front-end, which takes a .DSF file (DAAD Source File), a format very similar to the original .SCE but not the same, and generates a .json file which contains all the information of the game.

  • DRB: The back-end, which takes the .json file and generates the .DDB file.

You can download it and get more info about from:
https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/DRC/wiki

Why use DRC

There are several reasons:

  • It's native to your OS, no more DOSBOX Windows needed with original DC ("DAAD Compiler").

  • It applies some specific optimizations, not related to text compressions, which makes the output DDB file smaller.

  • You will be able to write MESSAGE "a message text" instead of having to create a message at /MTX section and then write MESSAGE n with the message number at processes section.

  • Developing of virtual condacts to do easiest the creation of adventures.

How to use DRC with MSX2DAAD

If you don't have your own adventure DSF you can read the related wiki sections, or download a BLANK DSF template from here .

As we said there are two steps: using DRF (front-end) and DRB (back-end) compilers:

1st step: DRF

C:\> drf MSX2 8_6 BLANK_EN.DSF

This instruction means:

  • MSX2: Compile for MSX2 system.
  • 8_6: This game use SCREEN 8 mode, and a font of 6 pixels wide.
  • BLANK_EN.DSF: Compile this DSF file. There is DSF templates for english of spanish adventures.

You can see now the generated BLANK_EN.json file at the same folder.

2nd step: DRB

You need PHP interpreter installed and include the PHP.EXE executable in the system path.

You can find is a lot of tutorials of how to do about this searching at Google.

Once installed and running type:

C:\> php drb.php MSX2 8_6 EN BLANK_EN.json

This means:

  • MSX2: Compile for MSX2 system.
  • 8_6: Compile for SCREEN 8 mode and a font of 6 pixels wide.
  • EN: Create a DDB file for english language. You can use ES to generate a spanish one.
  • BLANK_EN.json: Compile this .json file.

This step generates the final BLANK_EN.DDB file that must be renamed to DAAD.DDB before to copy it to your adventure disk.

Final considerations

If you use the XMESSAGE virtual condact to externalize some texts to a disk file, a 0.XMB file is created too.

You must rename it to TEXTS.XDB and copy it to your adventure disk.

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