The Dragon 32/64 Story - The UK Tandy Color Computer | Nostalgia Nerd
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- čas přidán 7. 10. 2016
- The Dragon 32 is an 8 bit computer made by Dragon Data Ltd in 1982. It was poised to compete with the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers in the UK markets. Based heavily on the Tandy Color Computer architecture, it was virtually compatible with the American machine, but different in some crucial ways to avoid lawsuits and define the Dragon as a new, Welsh machine.
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I was a Dragon programmer 1982-1984 and this is a real treat. absolutely first rate. i learned so much from this. thanks so much.
Hi, In Basic or Assembler?
The Dragon taught me a valuable early lesson in compatibility. A visiting British guy brought one with him to show my friend who I was doing Coco programming for, and we tried it out. Nice machine but it choked on several Coco programs. I said nothing but I remember thinking, this machine isn't going to go anywhere, and I don't want to waste time porting stuff to it.
I actually entered the Weetabix competition back in the day. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm still hopeful...
madderscientist23 did you?
Good luck man. I hope you win!!
ha ha ha same here, think it was back in early 1983. Was devastated when I heard nothing back, really thought I was a winner.
hi my names grenville weetabix and im afraid to tell you , no win ..the winner was grenville weetabix jr , what a stroke of luck for young grenville ,,he promptly threw it at a servant and went on to die due to a VERY expensive drug habit and gay for pay life style which he had taken up once i had disowned him
I entered it too, didn't win but eventually got a plus 4 for all of 6 weeks until it died and replaced by a C64.
Percy: "Could it be that I hold in my hand a nugget of purest Green?". Blackadder: "No, you're just playing games on the Dragon 32."
It's not really a nugget though, is it? It's more of a splat.
@@djsherz A splat today, but tomorrow... who knows?
I had a Coco 1 which I gave away to my cousin when I bought the Coco 2. Then shortly after I bought the Coco 3 and upgraded to 512K. Tandy did have a multi cartridge add-on which I also bought, a sound synthesiser, a graphics tablet, and I put together a double-sided Teac floppy disk drive for less than the cost of Tandy's single sided floppy drive.
What many people don't remember is that after the Coco matured, a Unix-like OS was available for it, the OS9, a multi tasking, multi-user OS on a 6809. Pretty impressive. I dabbled with this but couldn't do much with it as I didn't have any real-world use case for it at the time.
My Coco1 came with 16k. Upgraded to 64k which only 32k was usable. I had installed a tiny toggle switch to the side of the case that enabled the 2nd bank of RAM. From memory, this needed customised ROM which also enhanced the machine's functionality. Also fitted later was a lower-case kit where the character generator was removed, the lower-case board was inserted in its place, and the character generator back onto the daughter board.
It was also possible to copy the ROM-Paks by putting a tape on one of its tracks which inhibited the Coco from auto-executing the ROM.
The standard joysticks were shocking and felt flimsy compared to the joysticks that were available for other computers. So the Coco community discovered we could modify the tougher 4-way micro-switch joysticks for the Coco. I converted one for myself and several for Coco friends.
These are all the mods and enhancements that I can think of at the moment. Would like to hear your mod stories if any.
I still have my Coco 3 but never really got to use it that much at the time. I had also bought Amstrad CPC464 about a year prior to that (I felt like a traitor moving from the Motorala to the Z80), then moved onto the Amiga 500 (and back to Motorola, Yayyy!)
In Australia the Dragon32 could only be seen from the Coco magazines and at the time I thought it was outright clone by the Brits as all software was almost fully compatible. Maybe I can be corrected if this wasn't the case.
My first computer. It was brilliant, with a real keyboard, and that glorious 6809 processor. Made a career of programming thanks to my Dragon!
I loved the 6809! I never got on with the other processors after that. I think it was the indexing function I missed. or it was just my favourite assembler. Masm.
Another very professional video...thank you. As a kid, I do not recall seeing Dragon machines in Western Canada, but did play many of the same games on my 8 bit Atari computer, ST and Amiga. The keyboard and system design does really remind of the Atari 800 computer. It is also ironic about the lack of programmers, for I thought there was major compatibility between the MOS 6502 and Motorola 6800 line of CPU's. Cheers.
Ahhh, the childhood memory of the family slowly typing in a game from a basic listing in a magazine, rotating between the 3 of us the jobs of reading, typing and checking. Then, after about 8 hours of intense copying, starting to save it to tape and my mum getting up to make us all a cup of tea... and tripping over the power cable and losing everything (including previous part-complete save to tape because we had just started writing over it)
definitely 'slowly' with a dragon, type too fast and it misses your keypresses...😉
I had an old alarm clock set to go off every hour to remind me to save the program. Of course, that didn't help if there was a power cut 59 minutes after the last save :-(
we had a zx80, followed by zx81, zx spectrum, Dragon 32 and finally Atari ST. Always had a soft spot for the Dragon, I think it was the coloured label on the keyboard. Favourite games a tie up between Ugh and Lunar Rover Patrol.
Nice video. The games you showed at the end look really good, I was pleasantly surprised after what I expected from the system specs. Game coders really knew how to squeeze everything they could out of the old 8 bit gems.
My first micro was a Speccy, bought on mail order from Scotland. No gadget has moved me as much as my first micro. I had the micro drives and all :)
Brilliant! Thank you! Tonnes of interesting detail and very well put together. The soundtrack didn't distract from the narration which I really appreciated. Great job!
At 8:50, you said "Supply was outstripping production." I think you meant that DEMAND was outstripping production. I love these vids. Nice bit of history that I lived through. I was 22 in 1982.
You're right I did. I noticed that also, but I thought you were all on the ball enough to get it. It appears I was spot on :D
Really love all these in-depth story episodes!
Great documentary, I've often wondered about this machine! I remember having a Speccy back in about 1987, and friends at school had mostly either Spectrum's or C64's - but I remember someone with a Dragon 32, and remember at the time I'd never heard of it when he said. Always had a curiosity about these at the back of my mind since!
You nailed this. The tone, pace research. Everything.
wonderful video mate. very in depth. I learned quite a few things there. pleasure to have been a small part of it.
Thank you! And.. absolutely. Thank you very, very much for your assistance sir!
I think I am really liking this channel, very informative for us non UK computer users.
Sure I like LGR but seeing things from the other side of the pond (as a Brit would say) does fascinate me since the computer market was so different over in the UK.
You now have a sub from me sir :D
Thanks! Welcome on board.
Each country had its own computer scene, there were so many variants compared to today, the sad thing is that very little remains in the UK apart from ARM, mismanagement the pulsing birth of the computer industry in waves of growth and collapse means little remains, everything is massively transnational today and shareholder run, very little interesting regional variation exists.
I second that. Great videos mate!
Ditto. I had never heard of Dragon computers and barely knew anything about Sinclair or even things like the Commodore Plus 4 before I found this channel.
I love your videos mate! I was born a little later so my first machine was a commodore clone of an IBM XT, but the 8 bit era fascinates me very much. Here in Poland the gaming market was more oriented in the early 90s mostly because of the presence of cheap nintendo clones, but they have been covered to death by the yanks. Im definetely getting me some Micro Men to watch after seeing your videos about Acorn and Spectrum computers. Are you planning to make a video about the diverse market of the early home PCs in the early 90s in europe?
So much time and effort are put into your videos. I love it.
I'd forgotten all about leggit - that game frustrated the hell out of me, haha. I ended up with a dragon 32 as my first computer some time in the 90s. The weird joystick was missing the plastic top and was also slightly bent, and I didn't have many games so I used to go to the library and grab Basic books so I could copy the stuff out of the book. I remember a game called Pettigrew's Diary that was some kind of mystery involving a burning house, maybe?
Awesome stuff, thank you!
I bet someone or some people have noticed that when Dixons slashed the price of their Dragon stock, they also rebadged them as Atari 800XL, lol. Fantastic history lesson on the Dragon 32, my first home computer. Thanks.
Thank you. It's always nice to see information about the obscure computers of the 80's era.
Very thorough overview, with high accuracy. Very well done, pal.
Love this, you've become my favourite CZcams channel recently mate, keep up the great work!
What a fantastic video, really enjoyed it. I remember the Dragon coming into the market and recall some of the ups and downs being reported in the gaming press, but the full history and longevity of the brand was entertaining to watch.
Very informative and well researched. I learned a lot. Great work :)
Same here. I've never actually seen a Dragon system in the flesh.
dude why
Excellent video, thank you.I still have my Dragon 64 and it still works perfectly just as it did when I had it new in 1983. I can't see the pc that I am typing this on working in 3 years let alone another 30 plus. Long live the Dragon and all those that keep the fires burning.
Incredibly detailed video. This is exceptional content!
I love learning about old tech that I didn't know about. Glad I found your channel. You seem to know everything about 1980s British computers.
Excellent video, as we've come to expect from you.
Keep up the good work dude.
Great video. I mostly only ever saw Commodore, Sinclair and Acorn machines, mostly the Speccy, C64 and Amiga, with the Beeb being used at primary school, but we got the computing magazine Input delivered to our house so would often see the Dragon computer's screenshots and BASIC listings. SO MUCH GREEN :)
Thank you for another informative and well made video. I always try and watch one of your videos during my lunch hour at work. :)
Love the channel and the videos about the vintage computers..... Fond memories of going into boots / John Menzies and mucking about on them. The BEST memories are of going and buying the old magazines that you show! Every week I had another magazine or two to get..... Magic stuff! Remember looking at the ads and thinking "I want!"....
Good old nostalgia....... It's not what is used to be, eh?
This is a wonderful video. I was a ZX Spectrum boy during this period and the Dragon machines were a bit of a mystery, so it's been fascinating to learn more!
Awesome video . Very well put together
Fascinating, thank you. I had heard of these but knew virtually nothing about them.
the UK has a lot of variety in 8-bit micro computers, we in the US only really saw IBMs, Apple IIs and maybe the ocational Tandy or Commodore; the Dragon, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad were almost non-existent here in the US (though I later learned that a small number of all those systems were sold here in the States, but they are very very rare indeed.)
Really loved this video. It brought back many happy memories from the early 80s, when my paper-round money was gleefully spent buying a Dragon 32 from my mum's Kays catalogue; happy days.
Thanks for this! I had a Dragon32 as a kid, well, the family did as a whole, and I often get blank looks from other 80s kids when I mention it - so good to have some evidence out there I can point them at :)
Another excellent video. The early Eighties was such an exciting time for home computing.
i don't know why but i was expecting a dragon 32 episode uploaded soon. Awesome Sir!
You must be a wizard.
Then burn him at the stake
Another great episode again mate!
Being a Welshman myself, really enjoyed this one. Good job mate
Great video and good memories. I actually worked there in 1983, hand assembled and soldered the circuit boards on some of the early 64 versions. It’s a shame it didn’t work out better.
Ah, memories! I learned programming on the Dragon 32. First BASIC, then Dragon FORTH and later 6809 Assembler (although I didn't have a compiler so I had to manually convert it into machine code and load it into memory via a BASIC program.
I had (and still do) one of the early 32s so the speed up poke worked fine. In my experience the games that used it were all written in BASIC and wouldn't have needed it if written in MC.
There was another speed up poke that made it even faster, but you'd lose the graphics output and the only way to get it back was to hit the reset button. This was necessary if you'd saved a program to tape while using the speed up poke, since the loader couldn't handle the data stream from the tape, even when the machine was running at double-speed. I only made that mistake once!
Great video. Very interesting and very professionally produced. Thank you.
Thank you!
That was a really informative video! I've actually been looking to buy a Dragon 32 for a while now.
This is a blast from the past an excellent video. I have a Dragon 32 somewhere it may even still work. It is interesting to watch these games whilst mining asteroids in Eve Online on the other screen. It shows how much things have come on.
I grew up during this time and when most of us had ZX81s and Spectrums, and BBC Micros at school, one of my school friends had a Dragon32. I remember being impressed with it when I saw it. I must have been at school with a few nerds as one of my other friends had a Jupiter Ace and one of my other mates had a Memotech MTX.
FYI that Jupiter Ace and MTX are worth a fortune these days, especially the former - a unit sold on ebay last Nov for over 400 quid (item 265973827405), though I've seen them in the past go for 700+. Spot on though about the usage presence, though oddly enough my chemistry teacher's family had a Dragon32, I used it one time with his kids to play Chuckie Egg I think it was, quite fun, though I was terribly biased, to me the machine looked rather klunky compared to my Electron. :D I have a couple of 32s now in my collection, and a plethora of other systems, but still no Jupiter, ZX80, MTX512 or Acorn Aton, harder to find at tolerable prices.
I had one friend who had a Beeb at home, quite a wealthy family. Everyone else had Sinclair or Commodore. Did you have a system at all? Another friend had a C64 and I really liked its version of Elite, prefer it to the Beeb edition, indeed I ended up writing stuff for the C64, adding my own new commands, though I didn't really get that far with it. Maybe some day I'll finish what I'd started, a hefty text adventure (yeah right, who has the time in one's elder years).
Excellent video, very well produced and researched. I remember back in early '83 when I had been given a Vic20 as a birthday present, I would see listings for the Dragon32 in C&VG and wondering about this marvellous machine. I don't think I ever used one. Now I live in North America I wonder if I can get my hands on one of those $49 ones from California Digital...
Thank you for the upload. Interesting.
Got a Dragon for Christmas in 83. Had no idea it was on the wain, as you're video pointed out.Might surprise you more, the powerhouse of the dragon that was Microdeal, I'm sure I saw it somewhere that it was virtually just a mass copying of tapes in a house operation.Still, until I played on my school mates speccy, it was king. Donkey King, Dragon Trek, ultimate adventure 4, Flipper, Horace, all greats.
That was a lot of information to take in. I'm glad there wasn't a test at the end!
Fascinating and very informative. My very first computer.
Great video, well done :D
The Dragon 32 was my first home PC. The most impressive thing about it was the amount of memory and the operating speed. I later had a Vic 20 which took about five minutes to load 3K of data, and the programs were really slow to respond. The Dragon could load 28K in about 2 minutes. Last year I purchased a dragon 32 just for the fun of having a PC which does what I tell it to and also run Microsoft extended colour basic from the days when Microsoft was a (semi) ethical company.
Wow, Going from a Dragon 32 to a VIC 20 had to be a huge downgrade, I get that the Commodore had a large software library, but still..... ;)
That works out to roughly 2400 baud, so, entirely possible... I think the Spectrum defaulted to 1200, but a lot of early computers, probably including the VIC, used a very basic 300 baud mode... Essentially the Dragon had Fastload built in from the factory.
And Microsoft was never ethical...
fascinating video, great work.
Just missed this era of computers and never knew their where so many contenders to the thrown
Interesting Stuff. The Limey Computer history in the early 80's is amazing! Thanks for the video.
Nice mate , well done. The dragon is a machine I have wanted to mess around with however not got round to it yet
"This little unknown machine"? As someone who was very much into the micro scene in the 1980's, an avid reader of Personal Computer World, and a proud owner of an Acorn Atom (and later an Armstrad CPC 464), I was and am very much aware of this machine. Thanks for the memories.
Really interesting stuff. Not a machine I know a lot about, so very interesting. Cheers.
My dad brought a Dragon 32 home to us in 1982 or 83. In Canada. Had fun on it. Amazed by the first computer I had ever seen. After that it was Coleco Vision.
Great video man!! :)
Nice picture of the cover of "Write your own Adventure Programs" in the dragon montage at the start. :-)
Nice video. Introduced me to an 8-bit machine I didn't know about.
Great video, as always.
Thanks! :D
great video, i had a dragon 32 in the mid 80's, absolutely loved it, however games were next to impossible to find,the joystick was difficult to use and shaft used to snap. still loved the cuthbert series of games. dragon data ltd were just down the road.
In the mid 90's I bought a Dragon 64 from a mail order add as new old stock. It worked relatively well and I published a monthly news letter to my brother in the Navy for three years on it before going strictly PC
I loved my Dragon 32 - moved from a ZX81 so then had real Basic and high def (ish) graphics. No lower case meant I wrote a graphics mode word processor where I drew each character and even shuffled overrunning words to the next line and then saved the files on cassette. Started my proper coding journey :). Great video - shame they couldn’t make it work because it could have been great if could evolve. VIC and C64 plus the Beeb ruled and then weird sideline ones like Oric 1 and Jupiter - but Lisp was a bit much!!
Excellent video. Still got my 32 in the loft. California Digital sold their last Tano Dragon in July 2017.
Great video!
Nice work!. Love my Dragon 64 (have two of them, Tano) :-)
A lot of US customers were not initially aware of the fact that the "CoCo" wasn"t an actual TRS-80 (not being a Z80 machine) Did not matter to Radio Shack in the end, as the CoCo sold well, and the Dragon was the best CoCo clone as (IMHO) it had a superior keyboard, A big deal when you could not just plug in a different one! PS I want in on the Weetabix drawing too! Is it open to US shoppers? LOL!
Stirling work.
Excellent video
I have a 32 with a massive pile of the mags
I like
It was a lovely machine. I was a saturday worker in a small electronics shop in Crawley, UK, waiting to go to university when we got a sales contract for it. It was hugely successful, but two problems happened. Supply was limited, but also many devices had early life failures which I found was due to the PSU board breaking, probably through shipping forces. The PSU had heavy components which, when the device was dropped, would crack the PSU board. An easy repair, but a bit of a shame. The limited supply killed it for the shop I worked in. Very sad, it was a great machine.
I totally enjoyed owning my dragon, felt like a real computer at a time when most others felt like toys.
Ah just like them school 80s documentaries takes me back ❤️ I can almost hear Grange hill 🤣✌️🇬🇧
This was my first computer. I really loved it!
I remember Leggit well, used to drive me potty! Ring of Darkness and Pettigrew's Diary were big favourites too. Still play 'em via XRoar.
Still got the 'Pettigrew's Diary' cassette knocking around somewhere. And a few other games for the Dragon.
.
I had a CoCo in 1982 and I remember buying Dragon User magazine at the newsstand and typing in the programs. Most of them worked, but not all.
Nice video, thanks
Cool vid! Are you going to do one on the Tandy Color Computer itself too? Would be much appreciated! :-)
Very interesting and informative
My first computer was a DRAGON 32, still have it along with a bunch of cassette and cartridge games. Unfortunately the power supply burnt out a long time ago.
if it was the transformer 'brick' that failed, not too difficult to rig up a replacement, just a bit bulky as you'd need 2 transformers, the original psu used a custom made thing with 2 different voltage windings
Good grief the story of that company got complicated. Thanks for sorting all that out for us Nerd! :)
Great video!! I am big Tandy Coco fan. I have 2 coco3 one with 512K upgrade. I also have a rom pak with microSD that plugs into rom slot and works like virtual disk drive. I have a Tandy disk drive too, but love this rom pack. I have though about getting me one of those Dragon 64, because I think read somewhere that they have developed a multi-cart type solution for it also. Maybe heard about it on coco mailing list or maybe on tandycoco forum. Not sure which. Again great video!!!
You should upgrade soon mate... I hear the Commodore 64 is quite a computer in comparison.
@24:32: "The last Dragon show was held in September 1994 at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, the same day that Martin McFly wrote Johnny B. Goode".
Duncan was my lecturer at University. Great guy.
I have had several Dragon 32 and 64 computers in the 80s. Loved them. I happen to know that Philips used some Dragon computers when developing there CD's plants because of the 6809 processor.
thank you for remind me on the early Days and showing my 30 Years old, hand coded Amiga Ball Demo :-)
I loved the 6809E CPU as its Code was more powerfull than on the Z80 or 6502..
is true
A few years ago I've read a long discussion about this, it started it off with a battle between the Z80 and the 6502. Was the Z80 faster than the 6502, because of the clockspeed? At the end it was no. The 6502 might have a lower clockspeed, but they were doing things different and in the end it was almost with the same results, and then someone begun to talk about the 6809E and had even a lower clockspeed, but he gave some examples how this CPU works. It really wipes the floor with those other two.
@@xXTheoLinuxXx I've programmed the 2650, 6502, 6809 & Z80 in machine code.
The 2650 has 00h as "Branch Immediate Address Reg B" instead of the conventional "No Operation". Many hours spent debugging code because I'd accidentally skipped a memory address line when coding an EPROM. It can also only address 32 K.Bytes.
The 6809 has huge advantages over the limited 6502 but the Z80 has so much more capability in expert hands.
The Z80 does have a 512 machine code instruction set, the official 256 instruction set plus the extended CCh and CDh instruction sets. However the latter didn't always come out on the Z80's silicon wafer during production, so were not publicized widely. Instruction such as loading RAM addresses directly from IO (and vice versa) and other very powerful instruction were included in the extended instruction set.
Any Z80 can be tested with a call to these instructions. They aren't always complete but occasionally a Z80 with a full set is found. Only some 10% have all 512 instructions completely intact. I worked at a company, back in the 1980's, where one of my job roles was to test Z80's in stock for the extended instruction set as the company's embedded software exploited some of the CCh & CDh instruction set.
Boots and John Menzies used to be my favourite stores to pick up an obscure 8bit title. Those were the days....
Oh NO!!! Weetabix.... I remember having the big ones, at a bed'N'breakfast, close to Hadrians wall, back around in 1988. Those big lumps, makes oat grains without sugar and with skimmed milk look more tasty.
My first computer. Favourite games: Rommel's Revenge, Return of the Ring & Juxtapostion: Barons of Ceti V. Quite possibly the best feeling keyboard I've ever used. Cheers.
Cheers for this. My missus still has her Dragon 32 and the box it came in. :)
Something remarkably special about still owning the same equipment of your youth. I hope she enjoys the video! :D
Having spoken to her recently, it turns out she has TWO Dragon 32s kicking about. I did upload a pic of one of them to your twitter the other week :)
I used to play on a TRS80 in school and got a Dragon 32 for Xmas after that. Used to spend hours typing in code from Dragon User magazine then recording it to tape, I even databased all my recordings from the sunday charts on a program that I wrote myself so I knew which tape each song was on.
I used to buy games with a friend and we would swap. We bought Chuckie egg at a computer fair in London and it came with a dongle that you had to plug into 1 of the joystick ports for the game to load, this was a very early way to stop piracy - we took turns in having the dongle.
I joined the RAF at 17 and left home leaving my Dragon at home with all my games - asked my mother last year where it was and was told she had thrown it out :-(
Recently bought a Raspberry Pi and loaded RetroPie onto it - you can play some of the old Dragon (and other computer) games on it - my kids weren't too impressed how Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy looked on it though !!
Thanks for the memory of this classic machine.
At the time, I remember they went bust as faulty machines were replaced with new machines, rather than repair and return.
great video
I am as usual flabbergasted at your attention to detail and thank you for your video, I had a snooty friend that owned a DRAGON at school who used to consider Speccy users as a PLEB LOL and I in tern use to think the BBC owner was a mummy's boy.
I always though the same as you if clive had just concentrated on the spectrum as a games machine then we might have seen a zx spectrum survive in one form or another to this day!
Are you claiming that you actually *went* to school?