DragonPlus

[MaestroSoftware]

Hello everyone,

First of all, a happy new year and many many thanks to everyone - especially Simon - for running all of this and keeping the old beast alive. As for many of you, the Dragon (32 then 64 then the Coco3 under OS/9) was my first computer... and what pushed me into IT.

I guess no one remembers "Maestro Software", and a Hove show in which, as a 17-year old, I tried to sell a "database" (which I had designed as 1000 records of fixed 170-characters length, and max 10 fields, for my VHS collection) and a "graphing software" (which I had designed to plot lab results) under the name "Maestro Software"... anyhow, a bout of nostalgia overcomes me and I wanted to say hi.

When I transitioned to OS/9 (which gave me the first taste of a "proper" OS - and was superior to Windows for many many years, in my opinion), before buying a CoCo3, I bought the DragonPlus. I know it's in one of my "Dragon" boxes that I haven't unpacked for 10 years, but most of this material (except my CoCo3 hard drive) was still working around 2000-2002. So, is it really "rare" as the wiki says? If so, I will try and fire up my Dragon 64+Dragon plus one of these days just for the fun of it ! Do you know whether it's emulated by one of the emulators ?

Thanks to all of you for bringing back all these memories, and allowing me to delve into a part of my joyous and frantic teenage years.

Philippe (Hennebert)
(now in charge of IT in a hospital - thanks to the Dragon)

[robcfg]

Hi Phillippe!

Welcome to the Archive!

Your story is quite interesting, as many it/programming professionals around 40 years old ended on the field thanks to 8-bit computers, like the Dragon.

As for the Dragon Plus, yes, it's rare as hell, and I don't know if it's properly emulated.

Personally, I'd like to have one for a few days to scan the pcb and dump any rom chip it may have. Any chance you could di 300dpi scans of the pcb?

Cheers,
Rob

[MaestroSoftware]

Hi Rob (and all of you),

I'm afraid I won't have the time to unpack the old beast before early February... and then, if the old beast powers up, I don't think I'll take the risk of disassembling anything. It it doesn't, I'll send you these scans (and I'll send the board to anyone curious enough to try and repair it).

Anyhow, I fondly remember the times when - with my Dragon 64+Dragonplus - I had set up a dual screen ! One was using the std 51- or 64- column from hires (PMODE4), the other one connected to the Dragonplus. I frankly can't remember whether I used that setup on Flex, OS/9 or DragonDOS - probably more than one of the three. It really impressed my friends: multi-screen setups on home computers were pretty rare around 1987-1988.

I can probably also find a technical description of the board that the guy from Compusense had given me (can't remember when - probably at some Dragon show) when I had wanted to use the board to implement accented characters for French under the 80-col display. It would be great to finally complete that project, almost 30 years later. It was just a matter of burning an EPROM - but at the time I was (and still am ;-( ) better with software than with hardware. I was terrible with a soldering iron - and I remember that, when installing the Dragonplus board with a friend at the age of 14, I burned my hand pretty bad resting it on the tip of the iron... but I was mostly terrified of bending or breaking a pin from the SAM when transferring it to the piggyback board.

Anyhow, I'll post more about this in February when I try to start up my Dragon.

Philippe

[robcfg]

Phillippe, thank you very much!

We're absolutely in no hurry, and any info you can provide will be very welcomed.

Doy you still have have any copy of your Maestro Software? There's still a lot of programs, not only games, missing from the archive.

Regards,
Rob