Welcome to the DRAGON Data Archive

This site is dedicated to one of the many British small micro companies that never made it. The early years of mass home computing (1980-85) were the 'golden years' never to be repeated, with so many companies with so many products but the Dragon was where it all began for me. Whilst all around me where ZX Spectrums with it's fantastic game library the Dragon still won for me with it's better BASIC and 'professional' keyboard. The rest is history… so please feel free to browse around and take a look at what was Dragon Data and their products.

All comments, corrections, additional information, pictures etc. is always greatly appreciated, please email:

Please use a Dragon related subject mater other it might get deleted

eMail Contact

Spammers killed my email!. Spammer have kindly taken to using dragondata.co.uk as a spoof email reply address on spam email. This has meant my email on my domain has become almost useless, it means thousands of undeliverable emails a month and dragondata.co.uk being blacklisted by anti-spam bots.

New trial email is here:
Please use a Dragon related subject mater other it might get deleted.

As time is short I haven't finished the move to the 'new look', so some pages may not format correctly. Njoy!

Finds and News History
22 June 10

The Dragon presence at the VCF doesn't go unoticed at The Register. Not the worlds best comment, or as Steve C put it: The Dragon takes a bashing on the first page
21 June 10

The Dragon Data archive is thrust into the real world and help show the world the way of the Dragon at the Vintage Computer Festival @ Bletchley Park, pics and more info here.
11 April 06

John has been very busy scanning in the circuit diagrams of the Beta prototype. The keyboard and the first sheet has been done. Here they are.
27 Mar 06

MORE Beta Pics!!

The first public pictures a complete Beta Prototype.
4 Jan 06

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

27 Mar 06

MORE Beta Pics!!

The first public pictures a complete Beta Prototype.

The Beta gets its first run out on the 'highway', allow the first real test of the graphics modes, disk drive etc... and all appears well. All enabled by some great work on the keyboard interface.
26 Sept 05

THE BETA ROARS!!

After 20 years of silence the Dragon Beta (128) roars into life and boots into OS-9, so despite all the rumours it does/did actually work!! See the Pics...
13 Nov 05

Lack of updates.... sorry about this but the Dragon Beta is sucking all my spare time. The machine is now rebuilt, sadly it is still refusing boot. Only the plus side it is actually running some code ans setting up the PIA's but it gets no further. There appears to a fault in the memory mapping/addressing, so some reverse engineering is in progress to understand the process.

Oh, nearly forgot actualy forgot to mention that after staring at bare Alpha I have made a replica top cover, pics here.

Just to keep you happy ;o) a new Dragon Data advert.

And again on going thanks to Phill, Simon and Rob for their help.
12 Sept 05

Paul Grade who spent *many* hours running the National Dragon Users Group (NDUG) and even more helping Dragon users solve their problems has sadly passed away, I'll leave it to these quotes to say it all.....

" ..... I extend my sincere sympathies to his relatives and friends (the world over)."

"He was an extremely busy man, but never to my knowledge neglected, or failed to answer, correspondence."
Bob Smith

"Paul was one of those people who actually got his hands dirty and did things rather than sitting there and complaining that 'someone should do something'. The world would be a better place for more of his type of people. "
Tim Lomas

 
9 Sept 05

After XP SP2 the menus have been blocked by default in explorer, have now updated the menu to allow all the main titles to be clicked. This will also help other non explorer browesers.

I'll do best to get CGE UK pic's up within a couple of weeks.

BFN
18 July 05

The Dragon Data Archive is teaming up with the Dragon Archive at the Classic Gaming Expo in Croydon, London on Saturday August 13th 2005. We'll have Dragon 32 & 64's up and running for you to play on, plus the first public showing the Dragon Alpha + More, so come on down for a chat and enjoy loads of other gaming.

The Beta machine is in a serious state of resoration at the moment, i.e. not a single component on the board. Now begins the even longer process of cleaning the thousands solder pads ready for it's re-build.
19 June 05

Another visit to Duncan Smeed, or a "Dragon Time Team" as Duncan tagged it, has yielded some more great items. Duncan has *very* kindly loaded me a set of original Dragon Data Alpha (The Professional) and Beta (Drag 128) disks and stacks of source code printouts, these gems include:
  • Alpha OS9 boot disks
  • Alpha OS9 applications:
    • Dynaclac
    • Stylograph
    • Editor Assembler Debugger
    • Pascal
    • RMS
    • C Compiler
    • Sound Demo
  • Alpha DragonDOS v2.F
  • Alpha DragonDOS demo disk, with what looks like a couple of unpublished games.
  • Beta OS9 Boot disks
  • Beta OS9 Applications:
    • C Compiler
    • Graphics Demo
    • Pascal
  • Alpha Boot ROM source.
  • Beta OS9 Level Two Source code.
The disks are currently in the process of being archived for the future. Amazingly enough, out of the 25 disks only 2 have suffered from bit rot. This is a joint project with great help from:
  • Phill Harvey-Smith
    • NitrOS-9 updates, to be made public soon:
      • Update to allow single density on track 0 (Beta format disks)., D64 and Alpha versions.
      • Update to Alpha version for improved interrupt handling.
    • MESS emulator updates, to be made public soon:
      • Update to Alpha version for improved interrupt handling.
      • Beta emulation - Very long term project but the boot screen works!
    • Creating disk images of the Alpha/Beta s/w.
  • Simon Hardy
    • Disk image testing.
    • When the Alpha MESS update has gone through and the Disk Images tested, Simon will (hopefully) be making the disk images available on his site.

10 May 05

Well months of spending my evenings fixing the Alpha has caught up and meant I had to take a serious break. Recently been working (again) with Phill Harvey-Smith, who has done some absolute *stella* work over the last few months. His work has produced:

After NitrOS9 and DOS became available it rapidly became apparent that the Dragon Alpha had intermittent problems with the floppy drives. As Phill is currently the source of any software for the Alpha it required another visit to his domain to discover where the problems lay (Floppy drives, Alpha, software, floppy creating etc. etc.) After a good poke about and a re-cal of the floppy controller and it's back in business - a massive improvement in reliability.

Also added the Dragon DOS cart circuit diagram.

2002, 2003 and 2004

Updates for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
2001 and Before

Updates for 2001 and earlier.

 

Aims and Polices of the Archive
1. To preserve the history and products of Dragon Data Ltd UK.
2. To make the archives information and pictures freely available via. this website.
3. Items/Information/Pictures etc. donated to the archive will not be used for personal gain (sold etc.) or be exploited in any way.

Also many thanks to the other Dragon/TRS-80 recourses on the web, who's information has been most invaluable in compiling this site.

Disclaimer: (1) Please not that this site is in no way owned/affiliated to Dragon Data Ltd. or Eurohard.
(2) All information is to best of my knowledge and I can not be held responsible for any loss resulting from information contained within.

Web Contents (c) Richard Harding 2001-2010