Introduction

What is it? xDragon is our attempt at emulating the arcade games of 1988/89 by Data East on a IBM clone pc.. running DOS and a 32-bit extender. Further it is FREEWARE and will stay so for life. Please read further down the page to learn more about the condisions of use...

How is this done? It sounds simple but in practice it's not as easy a task... Firstly one finds the romsets of the games you wish to emulate. Next step would be to gather as much infomation on the game as humanly possible. By this I mean, the real technical information, in/outputs, circuit schemes...everything. With all that done it's time to emulate the functions of the hardware via software. Now everything gets bound together into a program (with documents and instructions which nobody borthers to read). Then finally with lots of hacking and some help from Lady Luck, the whole thing works and is released.

Why are we doing this? I get asked this a lot... In a nutshell, it's fun. For the emulator-programers it's like a puzzle, it's sometimes nice to spend hours coding in really weird ASM and C language, thinking of colourful and creative ways of implimenting aspects of the hardware on the pc. For the end user, probaly you, it's all about memories. When we play these games we are reminded of those young days. Seeing as we're in our 20's now these games remind us of our teen years. Of school holidays when you would pump your last savings into the coin slot. When perhaps...life was better.
It's not about piracy, as most people would like to think. An emulator will never replace the joy of playing on a real arcade cabinet...

Condisions of use:
The condisions are simple. Firstly, xDragon is FREEWARE. This means that it is totaly free! You may copy it and give it to anyone you like, in-fact, this is encouraged. Please give it to anyone and everyone! But please note, you may not modify it and/or it's included documents in any way. Also, please do not change the the ZIP archive in any way. And lastly please don't include the romsets and xDragon in a single ZIP archive. You may make both xDragon and the romsets availible on a WWW page etc. But not together in one file...If you do this it will not only damage the development of xDragon, but also other emulation projects. Also, please never charge money for distributing xDragon. If you charged for this you're a dick and if you paid, you're a sucker.
Next: This software is given to you As-Is, therefor you use it at your own risk. xDragon has been tested a lot and on many computers, but one can never be sure and things we don't plan for can always happen. In short what it comes down to is, that we don't think anything bad will happen to your computer from the use of xDragon, however if it does...we're sorry but it's not our fault.

Romsets:
Romsets are binary copies of the EPROMS (the original chips on the arcade board). They are needed to make the emulator work. Nintendo have show us with their law-suit-theats that making copies of these roms is highly ilegel. I'm not sure how Data East feel about the topic, but I think (and hope) they don't care, and enjoy xDragon with us. Perhaps someday a past employee of Data East/other teams will join the emulation scene and share some forgotten information...who knows?
Back to the legality of it...Currently there are two trends concerning coping roms. One suggests that you may only own a binary copy of the roms if you own the original chips, and so use the binary copies as a backup. The other school of thought suggests that you may download the roms as evulation and after 24-hour they must be distroyd.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't care what you do. It's your choice and has nothing to do with me. Just because I provide them for you here, does not mean that you have to download them...Do what you think is best.

With all that said, funish up reading the texts, and get on downloading so to start enjoying xDragon with us...

If you have any comment about the xDragon section : Shaun Johnston