Be Excellent To Each Other

As it seems to be "odd 8-bit month" I thought I may as well chuck my 2p in, with one of Wales' finest exports. Ladies and gentlmen, I give you the Dragon 32.

http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/D ... mputer.jpg

Getting the boring technical stuff out of the way it had a 6809 processor and as the name suggests, 32kb of RAM. A sturdy but fairly wooden feeling keyboard, and some pretty naff analog joysticks were your points of contact. Unfortunately where it really fell down were the graphics which could at best manage 4 colours but in higher resolution as needed for some games, just two. A disk drive was available but we were stuck with the far more common tape option. It had a cartridge slot too, but games were rare and pricey. Interestingly, it was electronically almost identical to the Tandy TRS80 and a lot of the software was interchangeable.

I believe ours arrived in 82 soon after launch and came from a fascinating and long gone computer shop in the Great Western Arcade in Birmingham with benches full of all sorts of machines. I sometimes hear people complaining that it's difficult to pick between a couple of consoles now, but back then there were dozens of them to choose from. Some that I can remember being on sale at the time include the Vic 20, ZX81, Philips Videopac G7000, the Atari 400, Texas TI/99, Oric, BBCs and so on and so forth. I really have no idea what the decision making process was, but knowing my dad's ability to believe everything a salesman says and then buy the wrong thing I doubt it was particularly discerning. Still, back then any computer was amazing and I was more than happy to get stuck in.

The first couple of games I remember were Dragon Invaders - a bog standard Space Invaders clone that played pretty well and was a real step up from the Atari Woody that the neighbours had..
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... 1_Game.png

And Frogger, which unusually, was an official game rather than a dodgy rip off, back in the days when copyright meant nothing.
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... _Cover.jpg
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... evel_1.png

Ask any Dragon owner (if you can find one) for the name of some of the games and "Madness and the Minotaur" is likely to be right at the top of the list. It's a text based adventure with some very distinctive features. It ran in real time for one, so if you got distracted, chances are you'd end up dead. It used a 3d design with multiple levels and was bloody difficult to try and map despite using a grid, as you could leave the right side of the map and end up on the left but further to the south.

http://www.figmentfly.com/madnessandthe ... ttext2.jpg

http://www.figmentfly.com/madnessandthe ... _First.gif

The logic is particularly tortuous as well. One example of this is that to learn the eight spells, you need to be in the correct room, carrying the correct objects, but they are randomly generated each time you load the game. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to complete, and some of the rules have only been figured out by looking at the source code.

Should you wish to drive yourself mad, you can play it online from here.
http://www.figmentfly.com/madnessandtheminotaur/

Any half way successful computer needs it's own flagship series of games, and as well as conversions of the Horace games as seen on the Speccy,
the dragon had a selection of games starring Cuthbert. A bespectacled little tit that didn't really have any kind of street cred when it came to playground bragging rights

A few I can remember playing include Cuthbert goes digging.
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... _Cover.jpg

Cuthbert in the Mines
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... _Inlay.jpg
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... shot03.png

Cuthbert in the Jungle which is basically Pitfall - copyright, schmopyright
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... shot03.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9QZCfFmAsc

How about this for quality Artwork? Dragon Trek - a Star Trek game with a surprisingly detailed recreation of the show and absolutely no royalties paid, despite featuring Klingons, Mr Sulo and so on.
http://www.dragonwiki.com/wiki/images/S ... ontrek.jpg
The in game graphics lived up to the promise of the cover.....
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... shot05.png
http://archive.worldofdragon.org/images ... shot04.png

Ok, enough crap. Now for some quality.

How about some Chucky Egg style platforming with Cashman?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqP_adDSTqc

I was playing an emulated version of this recently and it's still very enjoyable despite being 30 years old which is more than can be said about a lot of games of this era.

Ice Castles is a Crystal Castles clone which was more than a little tricky with a floppy analog stick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPxrKTxvHLU

Bosconian got turned into Draconian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UYezGTpRuQ

With very little overlap with the more mainstream systems that followed on a year or two later, us poor Dragon owners didn't get many chances to brag about superior versions of games, but we did at least get decent conversions of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.
Ok, so they were black and white, but we got 22 levels instead of 20 on the first game and an extra 15 screens on the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpkgqyXu5Ek

Ok, so you still didn't get any of the mythical levels that playground gossip would have you believe existed but when you had arguably the best version of what would now be a AAA game it felt good to own a Dragon.

Oh, and lets not forget the "unbreakable" copy protection which it didn't take long to transpose onto graph paper.
http://www.dragonwiki.com/wiki/images/S ... adlock.jpg

I've still got my Dragon in the loft and also my Grandad's one, along with all our games - with nobody else to copy from they were all originals too! I'll fish it out and get some photos soon.

Unsurprisingly, like a lot of systems of that era, the Dragon didn't have a long lifespan - just two years in the UK before they were dumped on the market at Dixons at knock down prices. There was a "high end" Dragon 64 with twice the memory but all the same limitations which lived on in Europe for a couple more years as the Dragon 200, but once my parents had given up on any pretence of us using it for anything other than games we moved on to the C64.

Never had the pleasure of the Dragon myself. I'd do a write up on the Commodore +4 if I had any solid memories other than icicle works

This thread shows home computer sales in the UK for the second half of 1983 and how the Dragon goes from 2nd in the market to 7th in approx 4 months. We now know it nosedived even further towards Christmas and by the middle of the following year the company was no longer viable. Dragon closed the same month the first CPC's hit Dixons.

Alan Sugar: Dragonslayer

I'd expect such rapid shifts in position would have been accompanied by price changes. Fascinating stuff that you'd miss out on as a kid.
I'm not particularly surprised by the Dragon's death though. There's a minimum number of sales you need to keep a system profitable and with so much competition it was obvious some would be pushed aside. Plus, the better computers did win out in the end.

Its also quite a bad thread to try and track Atari down since from what I can see there are 3 different lines all for Atari 8-bit the 400 / 800 / 600XL and its covering the launch of the 600xl with presumably the 800xl following on shortly.

The Register have one of their always-engrossing retrospectives on the Dragon:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/01 ... years_old/