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Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2015 12:23 am
by Lothos
Hi all,
I am only recently rediscovering the joys of my Dragon 32.
I always wanted to get a disk drive to run on my Dragon but the opportunity to do this now seems to be a rare and expensive one!
I see that there seem to be a lot of modern twists on running drives on Dragons so my question is, what do I need to get (and where from) in order to experience disk drive use on a Dragon 32?
Oh... and if anyone has a genuine Dragon Drive they don't want anymore please message me!
Thanks in advance.
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 10:09 pm
by Stig
First thing you need is a Dos controller. You can buy the recently made ones here:
http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... -new-10652
You can connect several different floppy drives to that, original dragon, BBC compatible or even a PC 3.5" drive
Getting software onto actual floppy disks is a whole different story
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 10:38 pm
by Lothos
Thanks Stig,
I'll get the controller and drive sorted first, then I'll come back and ask about the software!
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 11:05 pm
by Stig
Lothos wrote:Thanks Stig,
I'll get the controller and drive sorted first, then I'll come back and ask about the software!
No worries. I should be able to guide you through the process. It wasn't easy for me, had to use 3 different PC's to get it all setup but now I can easily write any dragon .vdk disk image to 3.5" floppy disks and then load them on my dragon
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 8:14 pm
by Lothos
Does anyone know if a trs-80 color computer disk controller will work without modification in a Dragon 32?
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2015 5:50 pm
by zephyr
No. Disk Extended Color Basic (CoCo DOS) needs the CoCo BASIC ROM.
Re: Playing with disk drives - what do I need?
Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2015 12:01 am
by tormod
Lothos wrote:Does anyone know if a trs-80 color computer disk controller will work without modification in a Dragon 32?
You'll need to replace the controller ROM with a DOS that integrates with Dragon BASIC
and is compatible with the disk controller. HDB-DOS for Dragon should work, as well as the SuperDOS ported to CoCo disk controllers (just learned about that one tonight
https://pairlist5.pair.net/pipermail/co ... 50438.html).