Dragon 32

The Dragon 32 was a computer made by a toy company. Mettoy, the maker of Corgi die-cast models, announced it in July 1982 as “a new 32K RAM family computer with real keyboard, colour, graphics and sound for £200”, with final assembly in Swansea. It reached the shops that August at £199.50, with double the memory of the 16K ZX Spectrum, “supplies of which at that time were shaky”, as Your Computer later put it.

Inside, it was a close cousin of Tandy’s American TRS-80 Color Computer: the same Motorola 6809E processor, the same SAM memory controller, the same MC6847 video chip and a Microsoft BASIC. Computer & Video Games thought that “with a toy company behind it”, the Dragon “should be a games-player’s machine. It is!” Two years later its maker was in receivership, and the Dragon’s next owners were building it in Spain.

Fast facts

• Launched: August 1982, announced by Mettoy in July.
• Price: £199.50.
• Maker: Mettoy, then Dragon Data from late 1982; from 1984, Eurohard in Spain.
• CPU: Motorola 6809E at 0.89 MHz, clocked by the SAM.
• Memory: 32K RAM, 16K ROM holding Microsoft Extended Color BASIC.
• Video: MC6847 VDG. 32×16 text; graphics up to 256×192 in two colours or 128×192 in four.
• Sound: a 6-bit digital-to-analogue converter, heard through the television.
• Ports: cartridge slot, two joysticks, cassette, Centronics printer, TV and monitor.

A toy company’s computer

Tim Danton’s history of the machine credits Tony Clarke, Mettoy’s financial director and a former electrical engineer, with the idea. Mettoy knew how to mass-produce and sell to children, and Clarke persuaded its board to fund a computer. The company hired PA Technology in Cambridge to design it. Ian Thompson-Bell, who led that work, told Danton that Mettoy “came along to the very first meeting with a Tandy CoCo, and the data sheet for the Motorola SAM chip”, and asked for a machine like it.

The result was reviewed in Your Computer in August 1982. Tim Hartnell called it “British-assembled and designed, around a Tandy Color Computer ROM”, liked the “real keyboard and 32K RAM”, and gave it seven or eight out of ten. He found the colour commands fussy, the manual hard going on colour, and the red “far from satisfactory”. He noted that the company “did not announce the computer until the production lines were running, in the hope of avoiding supply problems”. Danton reports that Mettoy had budgeted for 10,000 machines in 1982 and built more than 30,000.

The toy business was in trouble all the same. In November 1982 Mettoy sold the project to a consortium and kept a minority stake. Dragon Data became an independent Welsh company, backed mainly by Prutech, the investment arm of the Prudential, and the Welsh Development Agency. By the autumn of 1983 its address was the Kenfig Industrial Estate at Margam, Port Talbot.

A Color Computer in a British case

The Dragon and the Color Computer share a design, but they were not identical. The Dragon added a Centronics printer port. Its BASIC was laid out differently in ROM, so many CoCo cassette programs would not load without conversion, and programs saved as ASCII text were the easiest to move between them. Your Computer noted at launch that the Dragon could run “certain Tandy Color Computer cartridges”.

The 6847 was designed for American NTSC television, and Britain used PAL. Thompson-Bell told Danton that his first job was to find a way of getting the chip to produce a PAL picture. Dragon User told a reader in 1983 that early Dragons ran their master crystal at 14.31818 MHz, the NTSC figure, and that later machines used 14.218 MHz to improve picture quality.

The hardware

Inside the Dragon, the 1983 technical guide by Duncan Smeed and Ian Sommerville, describes the display hardware as three chips: the 6847 VDG, which generates the picture; the 6883 SAM (synchronous address multiplexer); and a 6821 PIA (peripheral interface adapter), which carries the VDG’s mode settings. Smeed had written the Dragon’s low-level software for Mettoy.

The SAM runs the machine. It “has been specifically designed to provide the necessary control and timing signals for the M6809, the VDG chip, and the video RAM”. It divides its crystal by 16 to clock the processor at about 0.89 MHz, and shares the same RAM between the processor and the VDG. Motorola’s data sheet also offers an address-dependent mode that runs ROM and I/O accesses at double speed. On the Dragon that is the well-known POKE 65495,0, though Dragon User pointed out that the Dragon 32 “was never designed to run at 1.8 MHz”.

Its register is set by address. The book poses the question itself:

The SAM control register is memory mapped at address FFC0 and occupies the address range FFC0 to FFDF. As the control register is 16 bits wide, why are 32 bytes allocated in memory to that register?

Each bit gets two addresses. Writing to the even one clears the bit and writing to the odd one sets it. The data written does not matter. In the book’s own mode-setting routine the accumulator holds a value being kept for something else entirely while the stores go out:

SAMMOD    PSHS A           ; Preserve VDG pattern
          STA SAMV0C       ; Clear V0
          STA SAMV1C       ; Clear V1
          STA SAMV2C       ; Clear V2

Three STA instructions store the same register and clear three different bits, because they go to three different addresses.

A screen mode lives in two chips. The SAM has mode bits V0–V2 and the VDG has GM0–GM2, set through the PIA. Both must agree for a mode to work. Usually the bits match directly, but there are three exceptions:

Colours come in sets. The VDG “has the capability of generating eight colours but, when colour graphics modes are used, memory restrictions limit the number of colours which may be displayed to four”. A program picks one of two fixed sets: green, yellow, blue and red, or buff, cyan, magenta and orange. The highest resolution, 256×192, has two colours. The Dragon’s advertising counted nine colours, the eight plus black. The text screen is 32 characters by 16 lines in green, and Your Computer later remembered Dragon fans growing “a little tired of that ubiquitous shade of green”. The MC6847 entry covers the full set of modes.

Sound is a 6-bit DAC. The book lists four sound sources: the 6-bit digital-to-analogue converter, the cassette, the cartridge port and a single PIA bit. An analogue switch picks one and sends it to the television’s speaker.

Software

At first most software came from Dragon Data itself, on £19.95 cartridges such as Berserk, Cosmic Invaders and Meteoroids and on cheaper cassettes. Your Computer complained that “eight programs could cost you as much as the computer”. Third parties followed. Microdeal in Cornwall converted Color Computer games and became the Dragon’s most prolific publisher; in 1984 Activision took it to court over Cuthbert in the Jungle, a close copy of Pitfall!, and won. Hits from other machines arrived too: by November 1984 a Dragon Manic Miner was on sale at £7.95.

The Dragon was also a machine people learned on. Andrew Braybrook bought one after a ZX81, and Philip and Andrew Oliver’s first published program was a Dragon 32 type-in, printed in Computer & Video Games in January 1984.

The fall of Dragon Data

Sales slowed in the summer of 1983. Prutech put together a rescue package, and Tony Clarke left. His successor, Brian Moore, came from GEC, in which the Prudential was also a shareholder. In early 1984 GEC McMichael took over UK sales and marketing, and advertised the “GEC Dragon 64”. Dragon Data announced two new machines, a business computer called the Professional (code-named Alpha) and a larger design code-named Beta, but neither went on sale.

At the beginning of June 1984 Dragon Data called in the receivers. Dragon User reported that Tandy and GEC had both shown interest in buying the company. Graftgold’s Steve Turner, whose early games Braybrook had converted for the Dragon, later said that when production stopped, “sales of Dragon games almost immediately ceased, with only a few hundred of each game sold”. In a 1988 look back at failed machines, Your Computer judged the Dragon 32 “probably closest to being an outright success”, with sales “apparently approaching 100,000”.

The Spanish years

The buyer was Eurohard SA, a new Spanish company. Dragon User reported in October 1984 that it had taken Dragon Data’s assets “lock, stock and barrel”, was believed to have paid £1 million, and would start production at a plant in Cáceres. In January 1985 the magazine interviewed its president, Eduardo Merigo: production had begun, about 500 machines a day were being built, and the company planned enhanced models and an MSX computer. Eurohard wanted the Dragon to be Spain’s educational computer, with a television series behind it.

In May 1985 Eurohard claimed 20,000 sales in Spain in the last three months of 1984, and said it would concentrate on the Dragon 64 with disk drives. Accounts of what came next differ. Retro Gamer says Eurohard released a Dragon 200, “essentially a Dragon 64 with a Spanish keyboard”, before it “fizzled out”. Danton writes that the enhanced Dragon 200 was designed but never sold. At Madrid’s SIMO trade fair in late 1985 Eurohard showed a mock-up of a Dragon MSX, due on sale early in 1986 at about 55,000 pesetas. By August 1987 Dragon User could only say that “as far as we know” Eurohard was still in business, and in 1988 Your Computer reported a 128K Dragon from Eurohard of which “little has been heard”.

The machine outlived its makers. About 7,000 people came to Britain’s first 6809 Colour Show for Dragon and Color Computer owners at the end of 1984, and Dragon User was still publishing in January 1989.

See also

• Dragon Data
• Dragon 64
• Tandy Color Computer
• Motorola 6809
• MC6847