DragonPi Project
Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 6:54 pm
As this is as good a place as any I suppose, I thought I'd share some pictures of my Dragon32. I don't normally give up easily but I've totally given up on trying to repair this. Its not all bad though cos my poorly Dragon32 has now been given a new lease of life and been reborn as the...............wait for it............. DragonPi
I wasn't prepared to give up totally thgough and just toss it in the bin. Seeing as I had a spare Raspberry Pi 2 and the Dragon has plenty of room inside the case, I thought it would be a tasty project to stick the Pi into the case and have it run the Xroar emulator. The keyboard is fully functional and is connected to the Pi2 using an Arduino Leonardo board to basically create a USB keyboard. I still need to use a wireless USB keyboard for anything involving the Raspberry Pi command line as the Dragon Keyboard doesn't have enough keys and is missing Ctrl, Tab, ~ and the F-Keys but for normal use it works just as you would expect.
Although the motherboard is not working, I've left it in place within the case. The main reason is maybe one day I might come back to it and get working, but I also can't bring myself to bin it because I hate to see these kinds of things done where there are massive empty holes in the case or they've been gummed up with hotglue and the innards from a usb hub. Also I was thinking that I might repurpose the power connector and make it into a joystick port for an old Atari joystick Cut the traces and connect it to the Pi GPIO.
I've not hacked the case to pieces to accommodate power socket, usb, video out etc. like I've seen so many people doing with their poor old C64/ZX81 cases. Instead I thought I'd make some sort of interface using a rom cartridge case. In the event that I want to revert it back to a working Dragon then I'm not too upset to have only sacrificed the cartridge case. Seemed to make more sense than Dremelling the living daylights out of the Dragon case!
The only case mod I had to make was to the inside of the cart slot cover. I removed a small notch of plastic with the Dremel to allow the power, HDMI and USB cables for the cartridge case interface to fit through.
I only originally intended to have it running XRoar, so from the outside it would appear to be just a Dragon32. Really struggled a lot trying to build a copy of Xroar for the Pi that would run at fullscreen, and was user friendly enough in terms of loading tape images etc. In the end I've installed RetroPie. This now has the XRoar emulator built in, and it runs exactly how I wanted it to, so didn't think there was any point trying to reinvent the wheel. Not only that but I have set up all RetroPie emulators so can use my new DragonPi to play all my fav C64, Speccy game too
I wasn't prepared to give up totally thgough and just toss it in the bin. Seeing as I had a spare Raspberry Pi 2 and the Dragon has plenty of room inside the case, I thought it would be a tasty project to stick the Pi into the case and have it run the Xroar emulator. The keyboard is fully functional and is connected to the Pi2 using an Arduino Leonardo board to basically create a USB keyboard. I still need to use a wireless USB keyboard for anything involving the Raspberry Pi command line as the Dragon Keyboard doesn't have enough keys and is missing Ctrl, Tab, ~ and the F-Keys but for normal use it works just as you would expect.
Although the motherboard is not working, I've left it in place within the case. The main reason is maybe one day I might come back to it and get working, but I also can't bring myself to bin it because I hate to see these kinds of things done where there are massive empty holes in the case or they've been gummed up with hotglue and the innards from a usb hub. Also I was thinking that I might repurpose the power connector and make it into a joystick port for an old Atari joystick Cut the traces and connect it to the Pi GPIO.
I've not hacked the case to pieces to accommodate power socket, usb, video out etc. like I've seen so many people doing with their poor old C64/ZX81 cases. Instead I thought I'd make some sort of interface using a rom cartridge case. In the event that I want to revert it back to a working Dragon then I'm not too upset to have only sacrificed the cartridge case. Seemed to make more sense than Dremelling the living daylights out of the Dragon case!
The only case mod I had to make was to the inside of the cart slot cover. I removed a small notch of plastic with the Dremel to allow the power, HDMI and USB cables for the cartridge case interface to fit through.
I only originally intended to have it running XRoar, so from the outside it would appear to be just a Dragon32. Really struggled a lot trying to build a copy of Xroar for the Pi that would run at fullscreen, and was user friendly enough in terms of loading tape images etc. In the end I've installed RetroPie. This now has the XRoar emulator built in, and it runs exactly how I wanted it to, so didn't think there was any point trying to reinvent the wheel. Not only that but I have set up all RetroPie emulators so can use my new DragonPi to play all my fav C64, Speccy game too