#dragon 64

[fishmech]

When the living room is lit by the Tano Dragon through the vcr and the portable TV - all turns green.

[xoverit]

Kevin Stevens presenting a Dragon 64 computer to Gareth Tuttiett outside the Dragon Data plant in Port Talbot, Wales. (1983-84)

[100-dragon-art-prompts]

64.) Hydra Dragon

[tumblokami]

The Dragon 32, released in August of 1982 by Dragon Data, is one of only two Welsh computers ever made. (The other being the Dragon 64, released in 1983.) It is very weak, with a Motorola 6809E CPU crawling at 0.89MHz (890KHz), which is completely outclassed by other computers on the market at the time. The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 are identical systems, except in RAM; the Dragon 32 has 32KB RAM, and the Dragon 64 has 64KB RAM.

Compared to the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, the only thing the Dragon has over them is a lower price point. When it comes to gaming, the Dragon has terrible graphical capabilities. When it comes to educational and word processing work, the Dragon has the inability to handle lowercase characters. Some programs have hacks to get around this, but you really shouldn't need to make software workarounds just so you can have lowercase letters.

Unsurprisingly, in April of 1984, Dragon Data collapsed into itself. Their flagship computer systems were underpowered boxes that could not compete with the rest of the market. However, many enterprising fans (the computer has fans?!) have made their own hardware mods for the Dragon 64, which includes shoving in a new Memory Management Unit to handle up to 512KB of RAM, as well as adding in support for peripherals from the BBC Micro, and even a port of OS-9 to the platform.

[bleepstar]

Well, I did it! Here's my 29yr old Dragon 64, brought at least a little closer to the 21st century. On the right you'll see a HxC floppy emulator, attached to a DragonDos cartridge - my Dragon now thinks the 4G SD card is a floppy disk. It's running WIMP, and the Tandy mouse is the finishing touch.