Masterstroke II

Looking for a Dragon or CoCo game not already in the archive - Then request it here and hopefully it will either be uploaded to the archive or another member can upload it to this forum.
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neilcperks
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Dec 04, 2012 8:46 am

Masterstroke II

Post by neilcperks »

Just hoping someone might have a copy of this utility programme, which I spent many happy hours developing in my spare time and of course kept a copy and put it somewhere safe that I haven't seen it for 20 years !!!

Reading this site just brings back so many memories of endless fun, programming the fantastic 6809 processor, such a dream to work with. Before the days of assemblers for the Dragon32 I was always programming directly in machine code, but the result was always fast.

Finished up using flex on the Dragon 64 with the Compusense Plus board and, I recall, a plugin graphics board which provided a large number of sprites, enough for me to develop a pretty good :-D pacman clone. My greatest personal moment :-D was developing a full word processing programme for the + board 80 column display, complete with spell checker, all under 10k (the dictionary was held on floppy disk, but slooow). Unfortunately there were just not enough +board users to make these a viable commercial proposition, so the results of all this effort just gathered dust. But the fun was in the development.

Also used to modify a large number of clock boards for friends and patched the flex boot to read automatically on boot.

Anyway I digress, sorry to ramble on, just to say stumbled across this site purely by accident a few days ago and can't keep off it since re-reading the back issues of Dragon User !!

Keep up the great work.

Cheers

Neil Perks
tjewell
Posts: 346
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 4:58 pm
Location: Cambridge, England

Re: Masterstroke II

Post by tjewell »

Hi Neil, and welcome to the forum!

I can't believe I'm the first to ask this - do you still have your much expanded Dragon? I'm sure that many people here (myself included) would be fascinated to know all about it!

Cheers,

Tony.
zephyr
Posts: 1474
Joined: Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:18 am

Re: Masterstroke II

Post by zephyr »

Welcome to the Dragon forums! :)
neilcperks
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Dec 04, 2012 8:46 am

Re: Masterstroke II

Post by neilcperks »

Hi Tony, et all

Unfortunately not, many moves and personal upheavals later it sort of got lost along the way.

So to answer your question :)

Basically I had a Dragon 32, I think the first mod I did was to enable the additional 32k which was already on board on those machines. From what I remember the 32k chips were really 64k chips with only the bottom 32k enabled as I think the rest failed to meet quality checks (so they presumably got them cheap). Usually the extra 32k was perfectly usable, although I did come across a few which were faulty; it was certainly worth a try for most people though.

I really loved programming the 6809 though, was so simple, even at machine code level, and at that time there was no assembler available. That was when i started delving into the ROM and the other motherboard chips and was staggered to see how much the computer was capable of but was not implemented (goodness knows why); so I set about writing a programme in machine code to extend the Dragon basic with a host of new basic commands, hence Masterstroke II. This was distributed by Pickadee Software in Preston run by a great guy named Paul............ (can't remember his last name, so long ago) and sold pretty well.

Then I got into flex, initially importing things from US, but later through Compusense. Bought the plus board and installed, and that looked way beyond most other displays of the time; rock steady and sharp 80col; loved that board. But having to enter the date and time every boot was a pain so I built a separate clock board and connected it to the motherboard then altered the flex boot to read it as part of the initialisation routine. I then started playing with the 6809 again just out of interest; developed a simple keyboard reader routine, then a routine to display this character on screen. Simple stuff, but then I just kept adding to this to try new things and eventually finished up with a fully featured word processor in less than 10K. I had the dictionary on disc because of space but it was so slow that it would take about 10 minutes to check a sentence !! So I changed the routine to load the "A" dictionary into memory and check everything beginning with "A", then loaded the "B"............. you get the picture :D . Problem was by this time less and less people were interested in the Dragon, and I was getting more and more dragged into work issues that it just sort of fizzled out. Then Dragon User folded and that was about it for any information. I always look back on those years with great fondness.

More generally I remember having a Dragon32 for a couple of years before managing to get a new Dragon64 in Comet in Blackburn for the princely of 40UKP. I'm sure there must still be a few of my modded Dragons around Lancashire somewhere........................ The great thing about programming in those times was that you were nearly always breaking new ground; a few years later you just felt you were "reinventing the wheel", so the interest sort of waned.

I now live in Beijing, so I don't think there is much of a chance of getting another Dragon here, Beijing anyone ? :lol: But I did mange to get the xroar emulator up and running; when the black on green screen first appeared was a great feeling, although i still prefer the orange on black (less jarring and sharper) from Masterstroke II, although I'm sure I could get that back easy enough, just need to dig back into the 6809 guide and a dump of the Dragon ROM, or maybe find the "Pokes" somewhere.

I'd love to get a copy of Masterstroke II again so i can see how i did it !!! Anyone ??

Seems like a great community, and I certainly have a lot more exploring to do.

Cheers

Neil
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