Hardware Sprite Board

[vdc300]

Just out of curiousity...

I recently saw an advert in in old DU, that advertised an add-on board that added a new graphics chip to the Dragon, with 40x24 text and hardware sprites, I'm not dreaming this, honest! Did anybody actually ever see one? This is not the Dragon PLUS BTW. I'm thinking it was by a company called 'Grovesnor', were they the SuperDOS people?

Cheers

[vdc300]

OK

This is going to make me sound a bit silly, but I've looked through DU and this has prompted me to remember a bit more...
It was a news article, not advert, and I don't think it was DU either. It was 'coming soon' and was pitched at around £100, i wasn't Basic 42 or Sprite Magic or the compusense plus board.

Cheers

[Alastair]

Could the item have appeared in Dragon Update? You can read a few here http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... gon_Update , specifically you may want to search for "Microcare" on this page http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... ue_4_(Dec)

[tjewell]

Apologies for being slightly off-topic, but this thread prompted me to go off and read about the Dragon Plus card. Has anyone any hands on experience of using this? I've never seen one, but sounds like a cool thing to track down. Was it vapourware or a real product sold in quantity? Basically, will I have any chance of finding one?

Cheers, Tony.

[admin]

The Dragon Plus is not vapour ware - they do exist...but chances of finding one are next to zero. In the last 10 years oI have only seen one and that was given to me and currently with Prime to attempt repairs as it is no longer working. The scans of the documentation are on this site as are images of the OS-9 and Flex versions that support the Dragon Plus board.

When it was working its quite nice - booting OS-9 creates a 64Kb RAM disk, copies OS-9 into the RAM disk and is then really fast.to use... The 80-column text only display is only used by the OS and special versions of Edit+ - so of very limited use.

[robcfg]

Hey Simon, could you or Prime take some pictures and upload them to the Dragon Plus page?

It would be nice to have all the possible info, as it may possible to reconstruct the device. In the spanish www.zonadepruebas.com forums we managed to clone a whole Jupiter Ace so with info and time it would be possible.

As you say, it has limited use, but having a 6845 video chip opens new possibilities.

[RoyCoates]

The Dragon Plus is not vapour ware - they do exist...but chances of finding one are next to zero. In the last 10 years oI have only seen one.

Make that two. I've got one

I did some work for Tad at Compusense many moons ago (Flex Utilities iirc) and probably got it in exchange for that work.

Roy.

[dlinsley]

The Sprite board was by Premier Microsystems (DeltaDos), though I believe they folded in late '84 just as it was being released. I have two of them, both without the TI graphics chips unfortunately, that a fellow member of the NE Dragon Users Club gave me around '93. Like a lot of things, I've been meaning to scan the information in for a while... I had thought one of the boards was bare, and so I could photograph it for someone to reproduce the board, but alaw both are mostly built up. However I could read the ROM so that we can add support for it to XRoar or Mess (since its the same TI chip as used in the MSX machines, and so support should be quick to add).

Add another Dragon Plus owner here too. Malcolm Cowen gave me his D64 with this installed around '97 when I started my first job out of Uni in Bury St Edmunds. He was working on a contract job programming the OS9 systems at the British Sugar plant there

[dlinsley]

BTW it was the November 84 issue of DU that it was reviewed in. It's listed on the front cover: http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... 984-11.jpg