archive.worldofdragon.org

Hello everyone!

Thanks to the generosity of user NWOBHM from www.zonadepruebas.com, I bring you pictures and high quality scans of the Eurohard Dragon 200E!

The truth is that it doesn't have an 80-column expansion card. It has a piggyback board with a rom containing a new character set (lowercase letters, spanish special characters and accents, and assorted symbols), at the cost of inverse video characters.

The piggyback board has a jumper to allow the character set to be shown in normal or inverse video.

The 200E has a new version of Basic, 1.4, which takes advantage of the new character set.

The rom files can be found in the downloads section in the rom/dragon folder.

It's possible that the 200E PCB scans appear black, that is because of an issue with the thumbnail renderer. Just click on the images until you reach the full size one.

Regards,
Rob

Cool.

The 200 is probably the sexiest machine I own (but never use); great to see a variant of it.

Interesting!

How much access do you have to this machine?

What with the lack of MS copyright message on startup, I tried CLS9 and it seems to toggle between SG4 & SG6. I assume that on a real machine the external font remains selected in SG6 - tried to follow some lines back on the scans but after the NAND, traces get lost under one or other of the sockets...

It's nice to have the font as a ROM dump for a change, and not have to pick out pixels from a photo of a TV screen!

I'm wondering what Shift+7 does. Seems to put it into some other mode, like it's acting as a dead key for accented characters, but no further keypresses seem to do anything (until the next Shift+7 which just types an apostrophe).

Edit: my mistake! That's exactly what it's for, it just doesn't do anything in uppercase mode. Caps Lock is Shift+Enter instead of Shift+0. Oh and btw, that cursor (that changes in lowercase mode!) is weird!

Nice! One more Eurohard hidden gem discovered!
The piggyback board looks quite simple to clone. Too bad that the 6847 is soldered on most (all?) of the Dragon motherboards.

I guess Eurohard weren't that sensitive to copyrights .
Eurohard OS9 also omitted the Microware copyright message on startup.

Looks like a fairly standard external character rom circuit, there's details in the full version of the 6847 datasheet.

Cheers.

Phill.

I still have the machine at home, as its owner would like to get the machine properly documented.

So, If you want any test to be done, just post it here and I'll try them.

But, in the end it's just a Dragon 64, so I don't expect any weird behavior rather that maybe some weird letters if the program thinks it's writing in inverse video...

The 64K mode ROM dump seems to be corrupt.

Nice point! I'll try the original machine when I arrive home.

Sadly, I have no manual of Basic 1.4, just to be sure. Could it be that the whole basic needs the two roms?

If it works right on the machine, I'll redump the rom.

Nah, disassembling the 64K mode ROMs from both types of machine shows not too much difference between them. Haven't tried to pick apart why the d200e one is failing yet though.

Can you post the dissembled ROM code somewhere?