Hello !

[Yoruk]

Hello people,

I don't really know if there is a good place here to make a small presentation, so let's do it here.

I'm a big (french) fan of vintage computers, and I have since a few weeks a fully working Dragon 32 in my collection (and the Dragondos cardrige and external floopy drive !!). I found this in a yard sale, in a very bad state (stored in a box under heavy rain .).

After a big opening/cleaning restoration, the Dragon now works great ! I also made a tape-to-computer audio cable in order to load game WAV tape files, it works great^^ .

I am also working on the DriveWire interface to get more possibilities with it...!

So why I am here ? Because I have some questions... First, my floopy drive can't read discs. I also have issues with the Drive Wire interface...

I have also interesting french books that talks about the Dragon that are not on the wiki page. I can share some scans ! Also, my Dragon 32 board looks different from the ones that we can see on this site : I don't have the video tv modulator on the power supply board and I have an other unknown board for the graphics. Maybe my version was special for the french market ? Again, you may be interested by some pictures.

I also like to understand how these kind of computers works, maybe I'll try to make a cardrige from scratch...

What else ? On the personal side I am a robotics engineer in a stone sculpture workshop.

Here we are ! Please excuse me for my English, remember that I'm french ^^

[tjewell]

Hello and boujour! Welcome to the forum!

Do you know if your Dragon was sold in France, or has it made its way across the channel at a later point and perhaps 'converted' to work on French TVs?

Fascinated to see what's inside your machine, and what the differences are, so please post photos!

Cheers,
Tony

[Yoruk]

I absolutely don't know anything about the story of my Dragon. I just know that some parts inside (like the cardrige connector) are "made in France" (by "Connectral", but maybe all the Dragons are like this). And on the back side of the floopy drive, a label written in french give some advices about the power supply ("don't open it by yourself..."), so maybe some work was done in France by the local reseller.

Here are some pictures. Bad quality (made with my mobile phone). I need to take more pics with a powerful camera.

On the mainboard, the video chip (top left) was replaced by a very strong chip socket :

Mainboard without the "strange board"

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On this socket, this smaller daughter board was plugged :

The strange daughter board, with the "MC687CP AN48304" chip missing (removed for cleaning)

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This daughter board contains a chip "MC687CP AN48304" (removed on this picure, for cleaning) that is connected on the same support (I mean, the pins on the motherboard are the same used by this chip). Some wires are connected on the power supply board. AND this daughter board is connected to a new (?) DIN socket. (Note that this daughter board was made by Dragon Data. )



On this picture, you can see that the HF modulator was missing on the power supply board. The soldering pads under it are completely blank, I'm sure that nothing was never installed :

The two boards attached, before cleaning (had to unsolder the wires to this)

DSC_2497.jpg (134.68 KiB) Viewed 4453 times

Last picture, everything connected. You can see the new DIN connector, connected to the plastic case, with strange nuts and blots. It doesn't looks professional !

The boards installed, before cleaning.

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And, main point : I don't really know if this new connector works... I use the composite video output on the power supply as a composite video output (so, with no sound...). I don't know if I have a HF output. MAYBE this daughter board is here to add a HF output for the french TVs, but for me a HF modulator SHOULD be inside a metallic shell... and the connector doesn't need 6 wires...

So, any ideas of what it can be ?

[robcfg]

The daughterboard says RGB, so it's probably for giving rgb out on the Dragon.

My guess is that the connector is for plugging a Peritel/Scart connector.

It would be nice to have good pictures of both sides of the daughterboard and all the chips so we can figure the pinout.

If it gives a nice picture quality, it may be worth cloning.

The 6847 is the Dragon's video chip. The daughterboard connects to its sockets and the chip is then plugged to the daughterboard.

[Yoruk]

Here is a picture of the back of the daughter board. I'll take better pictures when re-opening the Dragon.

As you can see, some wires and resistors were added. Some resistors are also located near the DIN connector.

You are right, maybe it's a board used to get the RGB signals...

[robcfg]

I've just asked a friend and the empty sockets on the pcb are, most probably, an external character rom, as with the Dragon 200-E.

Do you have the other chips from the board?

[Yoruk]

Do you have the other chips from the board?

Unfortunately no, I just have the "MC687CP AN48304" chip. All the other sockets are empty.

Is the small square board on the middle of the Dragon 200-E an RGB video card ?

[robcfg]

No, it's an external character rom. It provides the lowercase letters, accents, etc.

I've been told that the rgb quality of the board won't be as good as expected, as the 6847 doesn't output native rgb and has to be converted.

Interesting piece of hardware anyway!