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New Member!
Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2016 9:24 am
by shadowmask
Hi!
After bringing the D32 out of the attic I fired it up and it still works
My dad bought the D32 back in 1983 from a Tandy store in the UK, think it was about £200 at the time. The hours we spent typing in the listings out of books.. saving them.. then the occasional IO ERROR when trying to reload
Here's the beast itself with some other stuff I got from eBay in later years:
- D32.jpg (298.98 KiB) Viewed 3775 times
Brian
Re: New Member!
Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2016 8:08 pm
by Rolo
Welcome home Brian!
Interesting things on your photo. Can you still ask your dad, what projects he or both of you was/were working on?
Isn't it great to fire up things after more than 30 years? I always find that very exciting
Cheers,
Rolo
Re: New Member!
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2016 7:38 am
by shadowmask
After the initial few months my dad lost interest in it but I stuck at it because I was doing Basic programming at school so it was a great help there. The next stage was machine code and a few utilities were made, one was a routine that drew text characters onto a Pmode 4 screen, it was real slow especially when the screen scolled-up. I still remember drawing those characters out on graph paper and converting the patterns to bytes
It went in the loft for many years until a guy in work gave me a tube of 512KBx8 SRAMS in the late '90s, one of which became the basis of a crude expansion for the cart slot, I wish I still had that - it was a veroboard with a 6821 on it, LEDs for port status, and an IDC header to access the extra ports. The underside was a nest of link wires all formed with 90 degree bends. Anyways, the D32 went back in the loft again for a few years, then I started buying stuff from eBay, a few game & utility carts, and an I/O expansion made by Maplin.
I think I will always have the D32, every once in a while it gets unpacked, fired up, played with
Brian
Re: New Member!
Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2016 2:15 pm
by Rolo
With your cartridge, firing up the "naked" computer is quite rapid, you'll see.
Re: New Member!
Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2016 12:59 pm
by Bosco
Welcome shadowmask.
I wish I knew where my childhood Dragon went. I never got rid of it so in theory it's buried somewhere?
A few years ago I decided to buy another off Ebay but it's not quite the same.
Re: New Member!
Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2016 1:08 pm
by Rolo
it's buried somewhere
Almogordo maybe, where they are all dumping their stuff?
Re: New Member!
Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2016 11:24 pm
by Bosco
LOL!