Dragon User Programs

[sorchard]

Found an old box of tapes in the loft with some programs I typed in from Dragon User when I was a kid.

[pser1]

Hi Stewart,
thanks a lot for sharing!
cheers!
pere

[sixxie]

Cool

I remember being taken with how the Expert System program worked.

Writer's not what I was expecting - I think I typed in a later hi-res thing called 64-COL (which I then patched up the wazoo to make it sit in high RAM, locate the video screen there, etc.)

[sorchard]

I think I typed in a later hi-res thing called 64-COL

Ah yes, I remember that. (Dec 1987). I typed in a lot of stuff but I've no idea what happened to it all. Perhaps one day when I'm too old to come up with new stuff I'll have a go at OCR'ing some old favourites.

btw I should have said thanks for your DU bibtex: it makes very short work of tracking down articles

[sixxie]

I think I typed in a later hi-res thing called 64-COL

Ah yes, I remember that. (Dec 1987). I typed in a lot of stuff but I've no idea what happened to it all. Perhaps one day when I'm too old to come up with new stuff I'll have a go at OCR'ing some old favourites.

I had the original program typed in, so this morning I quickly transcribed the article and the - incredibly bug-ridden - character editor listing: http://www.6809.org.uk/file/dragon/utilities/

btw I should have said thanks for your DU bibtex: it makes very short work of tracking down articles

Cheers! I'm finding it quite useful myself

[sorchard]

I quickly transcribed the article and the - incredibly bug-ridden - character editor listing

crikey you type faster than I can read

heh the character editor could certainly use some tlc. The end of the program seems to have been lost by Dragon User, could just be a missing RETURN statement, but as you say, that's not the only problem

Brings back happy memories of playing around with these programs.

[zephyr]

Thanks for the uploads, Stewart.

I have modified Brian Cadge's original "Dragon User BASIC Autorun" program to make it compatible with the CoCo and Dragon 64 (64K mode BASIC).

All three versions (32/64K CoCo, Dragon 32/64 - 32K mode, and Dragon 64 - 64K mode) are included, along with the original Dragon 32 Brian Cadge version from the July, 1984 issue of Dragon User magazine.

This was done in response to a post by Pere Serrat (pser1) which I came across recently while reading through some of the posts in the Hints and Tips section of the forums. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11077

[brianc]

I recall we got quite a lot of correspondence about the "WINDOWS" code - some nice comments, quite a few pointing out that it sometimes crashed on startup (due to a typo bug - we eventually printed a correction in Dragon Answers about a year later!) but mainly asking how to get it to work when a DOS cartridge was installed (the program used the same Basic extension stub as DOS so wiped out its commands & functions). I did write a "v.2.0" which would work with or without DOS by using the third Basic extension stub (yes, that was a thing!) but it wasn't a simple patch and we didn't really want to use a precious page or two of the magazine to repeat what was, basically, the same extension so it never saw the light of day.

Kudos to Stewart for having the patience back then to type all that hex for the Grand Prix game! Game programming wasn't really my thing (you can probably tell that from the game) - most of the stuff I wrote for Sunshine (or was asked to write) was intended to demonstrated how stuff could be done so it was always a bit annoying when we didn't have room to publish the source code alongside Basic loaders.

I'll try and dig out the source code for v.2 of Windows together with any other bits I can find that missed out due to space and upload it here - only 40 years too late!

Brian C

[robcfg]

It's never too late!

[sixxie]

Welcome back, Mr. C. Dragon Answers was often a good poke in the right direction, even if there wasn’t the space for much detail.