XROAR
Emulate the classic Dragon 32
Les Pounder dons his suit of armour and gets ready to do battle with the fearsome Dragon!
Credit: www.6809.org.uk/xroar
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker. Read his blog at bigl.es.
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W ales has a history of making computers, going back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi in 2012. Sony’s technology centre in Pencoed is where the Pi has been made since the first revision of the board (the first batches of Raspberry Pi were made elsewhere, but after that it was all Sony).
Yet before the Raspberry Pi there was another Welsh computer: the Dragon 32 made by Dragon Data Ltd from 1982 to 1984. After a short life Dragon Data Ltd collapsed in 1984 and from then production of the Dragon 200, a Dragon 64 in a new case, went to Eurohard SA, which itself went bust in 1987. The remaining stock of Dragon machines were given away to subscribers of a Spanish electronics magazine. But in these short years the Dragon 32 and 64 were part of the rich tapestry of 1980s home computers that inspired a generation to learn coding and to create their own games.
The Dragon 32 came with 32KB of RAM, and the Dragon 64 with 64KB, but both were powered by a Motorola 0.89MHz MC6809E CPU. The Dragon machines didn’t fit into the home computer market, nor the educational market. For the home, the Dragon machines didn’t have the best graphics or sound and the machine wasn’t on the market long enough to generate the interest of the big software houses of the time. For education, the BBC Micro was king and the Dragon machines were only able to display uppercase characters – not ideal for the education sector.
The Phantom Slayer is considered the breakthrough firstperson shooter and sees our brave character being stalked by ghoulish phantoms in complex mazes.
The Dragon could accommodate a CRT screen on the case. The full-size keyboard was only bested by the BBC Micro.
Despite the short life and shortcomings of the Dragon machines, they are an interesting machine with a rich history and fun range of games. So let’s delve in and learn more about the Welsh Dragon!
Emulating a Dragon 32
Our emulator of choice is XRoar, an application that can emulate Dragon 32 and Tandy Color computers. To install XRoar on Ubuntu we need to add a PPA (personal package archive). Open a terminal and type the following to add the PPA to your sources: