Results of a day and a bit of archiving of the most interesting of the large number of Dragon 64 floppy disks in the Museum's collection.
Thanks to Bart van den Akker for the opportunity to capture these! A visit to the Museum is very much recommended if you get the chance.
Home Computer Museum Helmond Dragon 64 archived disks
Home Computer Museum Helmond Dragon 64 archived disks
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Last edited by bluearcus on Tue Sep 26, 2023 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Home Computer Museum Helmond Dragon 64 archived disks
A little blurb to accompany this archive.
Very interesting set of disks... the Dragon 64 in question was obviously heavily used under DragonDOS, OS9 and Flex for document preparation, graphics and entertainment.
The twin DragonData disk drive unit had two replacement 80 track double sided drives fitted, with 40/80 switches, an auxiliary power take off at the rear and another mystery switch on the front facia (no idea).
The DragonDOS cart had a replacement SuperDOS ROM, including additional high 8k utilities, and a second ROM mode switch, for a further choice of ROM. The two ROMs that were in the cart appear to have been present on the 'Dossen' disk captured as part of the achiving.
A number of interesting OS9 utilities were present on the disks, including the Level 1 OS9 version on 'Sleuth', a disassembler / debugger, new hi-res console mode utilities for Eurohard OS-9 v2 to allow 64 and 80 column text modes, the dec printer control utility for stylograph, a modem OS9 comms utility and kermit plus other OS9 UG PD disk utility / sources. Also an OS-9 game 'Biosphere'.
For Flex, xmodem utility, various games and a Cobol language disk.
For DragonDOS, many utilities disks, many games disks, a number of utilities for converting CoCo programs and disks to Dragon, multiple music, graphics and DTP applications / utilities (some, like CoCoMax, converted from the CoCo) and a Dragon-ised version of the C-See video digitisation application, originally released for the CoCo by The Micro Works. It's assumed that the mystery 'pass through' cartridge shown in the other pics section is probably the digitisation hardware for this, but I didn't have time to investigate this at the time - I suspected it was some kind of Hi-Res joystick interface, not a video scanner!
The users of this system (or their contacts) seem to have been heavily in to converting CoCo games and applications to the Dragon, and there are various utilities and Dream sources for reading CoCo disks and performing some sorts of conversion activities, including at least one that puts a Dragon 64 into a 'fake CoCo' mode.
So lots of interesting stuff to check out. No doubt there are some games which don't exist elsewhere in Disk and/or Dragon-ised versions too.
Well worth the visit to look through this - probably around half of the disks were digitised, the remainder either didn't appear interesting or would most likely have contained only / mostly personal data. Thanks again to Bart van den Akker for the opportunity to look through this all and archive the most interesting elements.
Mike
Very interesting set of disks... the Dragon 64 in question was obviously heavily used under DragonDOS, OS9 and Flex for document preparation, graphics and entertainment.
The twin DragonData disk drive unit had two replacement 80 track double sided drives fitted, with 40/80 switches, an auxiliary power take off at the rear and another mystery switch on the front facia (no idea).
The DragonDOS cart had a replacement SuperDOS ROM, including additional high 8k utilities, and a second ROM mode switch, for a further choice of ROM. The two ROMs that were in the cart appear to have been present on the 'Dossen' disk captured as part of the achiving.
A number of interesting OS9 utilities were present on the disks, including the Level 1 OS9 version on 'Sleuth', a disassembler / debugger, new hi-res console mode utilities for Eurohard OS-9 v2 to allow 64 and 80 column text modes, the dec printer control utility for stylograph, a modem OS9 comms utility and kermit plus other OS9 UG PD disk utility / sources. Also an OS-9 game 'Biosphere'.
For Flex, xmodem utility, various games and a Cobol language disk.
For DragonDOS, many utilities disks, many games disks, a number of utilities for converting CoCo programs and disks to Dragon, multiple music, graphics and DTP applications / utilities (some, like CoCoMax, converted from the CoCo) and a Dragon-ised version of the C-See video digitisation application, originally released for the CoCo by The Micro Works. It's assumed that the mystery 'pass through' cartridge shown in the other pics section is probably the digitisation hardware for this, but I didn't have time to investigate this at the time - I suspected it was some kind of Hi-Res joystick interface, not a video scanner!
The users of this system (or their contacts) seem to have been heavily in to converting CoCo games and applications to the Dragon, and there are various utilities and Dream sources for reading CoCo disks and performing some sorts of conversion activities, including at least one that puts a Dragon 64 into a 'fake CoCo' mode.
So lots of interesting stuff to check out. No doubt there are some games which don't exist elsewhere in Disk and/or Dragon-ised versions too.
Well worth the visit to look through this - probably around half of the disks were digitised, the remainder either didn't appear interesting or would most likely have contained only / mostly personal data. Thanks again to Bart van den Akker for the opportunity to look through this all and archive the most interesting elements.
Mike
Re: Home Computer Museum Helmond Dragon 64 archived disks
And the Dragon 64 also had a 'mystery mod'. A twisted pair emerging from a little hole next to the cartridge port, going to a female header plug... I didn't get in to opening hardware, so what this little 'switch, if you plug one in' was doing is a mystery. One for next time.