Dragon32 Trash to Treasure | Repairing the Dragon (pt2) 

Thank you for watching I hope you're enjoying the series. In Episode 1 some of you pointed out that other computers were manufactured in Wales, I don't believe any others were designed, manufactured and supported from Wales end to end by a Welsh company so that's why I'm presenting it in this way but if you know of others to come out of Wales in any shape or form I'd love to hear about them. Neil - RMC

Your attention to detail and quality of production are second to none. Great work.

I especially liked the music on this episode. It was very relaxing and also trippy.

I love that you're breathing some fire into this old dragon.

Watching soldering is calming for some reason. :)

So wonderful seeing this old machine come back to life.

I'd suggest getting an insulating washer and a nylon bolt to secure that negative voltage regulator to the heatsink. It'll last a lot longer and means that you're less likely to be one knock from a blown regulator should you have it open again.

ahh retro man cave sits back pours a cup of coffee and breaks out the rich tea biscuits

I really feel blessed to have been a kid/teen in the early ages's of 8-bit home computers which were exciting times and there were so many models of computer when looking back and it would be nice to see a face value comparison of systems sold, tech comparison and potential debates/reasons why certain systems didn't match the expectations of them and value for money.

Thanks again for another great video. This is essential training for all of us who currently have working collections who have yet to tackle faulting parts.

Extremely high quality channel! Honestly right up there with 8-bit guy or perhaps exceeding, at a fraction of the subscriber count. Top notch analysis and entertainment.

I admire your soldering skills. I don't feel confident enough to solder yet. But i do want to learn so that i can preserve the machines i have :)

it' unbelievable to think that we made many successful computers here in England let alone Wales, I owned a Beeb back in the day, I am also half Welsh, thanks for the videos and the memories :)

I could feel the frustration when fixing one thing resulted in more failures, particularly when it seemed so simple. Well done another memory saved from land fill.

Nice to see it lives, This certainly makes me wonder whatever became of my old Dragon 32 from when I was a kid.

The Dragon lives on. It's great seeing you bring these machines back to life and I'm also glad to see you trim your leads before you solder. A mistake I often see on RU-vid is people who solder first then cut which can cause micro fractures in the newly soldered joint. The mood music was also a nice addition, great video all round.

A friend Robert Palmer (no, not that one) was a programmer for Dragon. I remember seeing a prototype Dragon that he had.

I never had one of these, so it's great to see it coming back to life and finding out what it was all about.

Been checking nearly every day for part 2 of this. I'm not sure WHY I'm so enamored by this series in particular...

I was proud owner of a CoCo and a CoCo 3 back in the day. The very early CoCo did have an upside down board to provide the PAL output. We jealous of the pseudo colour displays that could be done on the NTSC version but there were attempts to do it on PAL versions. Basically the difference was that where the NTSC version used one pattern the PAL version used two, one on the left side and one on the right side. The Dragons parallel printer port was something CoCo users wanted and I suspect someone did make a Centronics port cart. At least Tandy did make the RS232 Pak.

The D32 was my first computer. I went to (all?) 6809 shows at the Royal Hortical halls in London. Years later in college I used a 6809 embedded board to create an alarm system. Mine spoke! Yes, it was Beavis.

What a great couple of episodes - brings back so many memories :) Thanks for your time doing these, didn't know how much I wanted to see this until I saw it :)

Love this series keep up the great work

NEW RMC VIDEO! *grabs cat* *pours drink* *gets comfortable* *tells girlfriend not to call* Oh hell yes.

I'm very happy I found this channel!! Awesome work, well thought out and overall a great format :)

This is such a great channel.

Great video Neil. Love you restoration videos. Keep'em coming.

Never played on of those systems. Copyright was 1982 which was the year I was born. Great fix and another great video. Very well done.

This new lab setup is fantastic! Well worth you shifting your storage area to upstairs :)

Fascinating! I love this stuff. And the extended soldering b-roll is incredibly satisfying and relaxing.

I had a Dragon 32 back in the early 80's.. It had the RAM daughterboard which enabled me and my dad to upgrade it to more ram. Iirc, it was around 52kb. My dad made the tape-drive cable and we had lots of fun programming on it.

If it was a true clone of the Tandy CoCo, hardware and software would be exchangeable between the two computers. But for the most part, they aren't, not unless you make several hardware modifications, including swapping out the ROM chip. Opinions may differ, depending one what the word 'clone' means to you individually. But if in 1982 I had been sold a Dragon 32 on the premise that it was a Tandy CoCo clone, only for me to find out that all my Tandy CoCo applications, games and catridges didn't actually run on it, I would have been pretty annoyed. So by my definition, the Dragon is not a CoCo clone, they just share the same reference design.

That PSU board was a big problem in the design. I worked as a kid in a shop selling the Dragon 32, and we had lots of returns. All of them were caused by breaks on the PSU board. I was only 18 at the time, but I worked out that the delivery process, with packages being dropped hard, caused the PCB to flex. A quick repair, but yet another nail in the coffin for the product. Shame, I loved it!

My first colour computer and me and my mother took a trip by train from Yeovil to Portsmouth to the Boots store there to collect it, they were the first to have stock at the time. I'd been waiting to get a Spectrum but gave up and got the Dragon instead. Probably a mistake but someone I knew who did wait for his Spectrum had to wait 1 or 2 months later to get his and when he did he had to return it something like 3 times due to faults. The good thing about the Dragon was it's lack of software meant I was forced to create my own so did conversions of games written in basic listed in magazines for other computers. I seem to remember I converted games from the Sharp MZ-80k, Atari 400, ZX81 etc that used to be listed in Computer and Videogames. It was reliable and the keyboard felt very good but the display was not great and had a huge border. I actually used a black and white tv and had adjusted it to eliminate most of the border with the Dragon. Like many Dragon 32's the sticker on the case was a bit crinkled, whoever was responsible for that part of assembly was truly rubbish. I loved the time with the computer it seemed exciting somehow to own a computer and explore using it. Surprisingly some of the games were really good and the sound came through the tv if I remember rightly so was a world away from the pathetic beeper of the spectrum.

Awesome job as always Neil. Good to see a computer that only one friend of mine BITD had (we were all otherwise Speccy and Commodore kids) saved and working. I'm now off to cook a Dragon, 350C sounds a bit on the warm side for my oven but I reckon a nice slow cook at 160C will do the job over the next few weeks...

The first game I ever played on the Dragon 32 was this one called "Quest"...anyone else remember it? I still think that the keyboard on that machine absolutely kicks the crap out of anything in this day and age...ah, the good ol' days.

Brilliant work there! Yes it’s an underdog computer but we love underdogs in the shed. Loved the vid and kudos for rescuing the Dragon!

The Dragon feels more like a sibling to the Tandy than a clone, part of the same family, not a direct copy.

Great stuff and I can't wait to see this one all done and playing some games. Keep em coming, a world without RMC is not a world I want to live in!

Your content is just amazing, so professional and a pleasure to watch, as a 45 year old I remember all the old systems :-)

Great video!!! There was was a Dragon MSX coming out of Wales... though you may have already known and in a way this is the only computer to ever come out of the country, as the MSX was unreleased and there are only a handful of prototypes around. Speaking of that... hopefully one of these days you'll do something on MSX computers!

Great to see the ol’ Dragon 32 getting some love, was our first family computer

i was 16 in 1982 and i had four part time jobs and i still wanted one of these desperately ...i worked like a Trojan to get one and as i got nearer the total everyone stopped stocking them and stocked c64 or spectrum !!!

Komodo dragons are great swimmers. They can swim from one island to another.

Great video Neil. I always find it a great shame when components have to be replaced with modern alternatives rather than repaired. I can see why, but it makes me sad in a way. Great to see it working. A shame you had to replace the power port with a new one and that it could not be repaired, especially considering the new one was different.

"The only computer ever to come out of the country of Wales"- The Sam Coupe was entirely a Welsh product.

You should get one of those cheap transistor tester, because there is something satisfying about knowing the condition of the old parts. Mine does value and ESR.

Love watching these types of videos! Well done sir! Nice trippy music!

Geeee my first computer, just found it in my uncle garage in it’s original box....plan to try it soon.....rétro nostalgia....

I really love the case and keyboard on that machine. IMO, as compared to the CoCo, it seems to be the superior build.

Great stuff. I love my Dragon. The only computer to come out of Wales? Just gonna say "Sam Coupe" and leave it there. Also I have a spare copy of Cuthbert goes digging if you want it?.

As a crazy Coco fan, I really find this fascinating. I always heard about the Dragon 32 and saw it featured in Coco based magazines like Rainbow, but I really never saw what one looked like. I can tell you the keyboard is a step up from the "melted keyboard" that the Coco shipped with. Having just picked up a Coco 2 last year and getting it up and running, I can tell you the innards are quite different, as you pointed out. Fascinating stuff Neil..i'm loving the coverage!

Dragon where the only UK computer manufacturer to support the Japanese MSX system

Well done.

Great to see you get it working again. Maybe worth running some sort of test program to test all the RAM. For viewers, does Neil visually remind any of you of James Richardson? I half-expect Neil to be looking through old computer magazines while an enormous dessert melts in the foreground. So that’s my headcanon for this channel.

Ah, part 2 eventually, what a great Easter gift! 😇

I'm steeling myself for increasing amounts of green as the series continues...

I had waited for Enter the Dragon part 2 since 1973...

Great episode Neil! Nice debut from the new vice too!

"A clean down with some ISO and an anti-static brush" .. I'm just going to assume you were wearing your ground strap on your ankle ;)

Nice job!

I still have my dragon with the 6809 assembler cartridge :-)

Nice Video. It's interesting on the Dragon that the keyboard probably cost as much as the hardware which I think was a big downfall. I think having a simpler keyboard and more advanced hardware would have helped it sell much better.

Great episode as usual and I'm a huge fan off Nihoni Road 105

I have a dragon 32 with a failed psu and daughter board. The ac psu is virtually impossible to find a replacement for. In the end I bypassed the daughter board and used a jama arcade psu which had all the correct dc outputs. Great video!

11:48 ... "4K Color Computer" ... well that means something entirely different these days :D

Tape drives drove me nuts. Would almost never load. Those INPUT magazines behind you. I typed in many of it's programs multiple times because of the sodding tape drive. :) It's been ~38 years and I still hate tape drives.

Awesome as always

Great channel !!! Thank you for your correct pronunciation of 'composite'.

That is some nasty green on green lol

There was the SAM Coupe, which was made in Swansea.. I think there’s still one in my moms attic

Nice Vlog Neil great history and a great repair, the dragon lives once again. Why not upgrade the ram to 64k why....because you can mate😀see you in part 3 😁😁😁 Kim 😁😁😁

Input magazine. Wow!

Looking forward to part 3 !

It's really a matter of perspective on the Tandy clone debate, to me it's like "It's a Tandy clone, well great, I like that.". ^_^ I think the Motorola history lesson separates any facts from opinions IE. got to sell those chips.

I have a Tano Dragon 64 I bought a few years ago.

Fine work Mr Cave.

Awesome video!

I would say it is not a clone, since it doesn't seem to be reverse engineered or copied from the Color Computer, and so is not designed to run CoCo software natively, any compatibility would be the same for other systems based on the reference design The Green Thumb project was about creating a low cost terminal for farmers and agricultural work, what became the AgVision. The CoCo(and the TRS-80 videotex terminal, I suppose) appears to be derivative of this, but it seems a bit of a stretch to say that this makes the Dragon a clone of the CoCo...

That was weird. I said "of course it does " just before you did.

I still have my Dragon 32, havent run in it years. I had about 150 games for it and the majority were Coco games from a friend of a friend penpal in the States. They ran just fine . The key assignment was slightly different as i remember (ASCI?) - sort of 'a''would be 'n', 'b' would be 'o' , 'c' would be 'p' and so on and the screen/colour resolutions would be slightly weird. I know there were some fundamental differences in the resolution modes between the two machines

if you're gonna fix up a powersupply, at least with the power supply, just replace all caps doesn't matter if they're still good or not, they're old and won't last another 10 years anyway... then check the resistors are on value, replace the ones that aren't... but be careful there are no other components in parallel with the resistor or it could bring its value off...

Great video!

A boxed dragon 32!!! There can't be many of those around :-O

Good job!

Do you think you can bring this one together with a copy of OS-9 that was released by Dragon Data? This OS is also still under active development and would be a nice showcase. The 6809 CPU systems deserve much more public exposition than they get!

Good job.

Great video, look forward to the next, are you gonna do any Dragon upgrades if any !!!!

A "clone" is a fait assessment but given it addresses a different market and power requirements, perhaps "a port" of the original design is more appropriate.

Dragon Beta 128 very rare, maybe 2 or 3 in existence.

Another thing...I think the manual has programs with a red triangle to mark a 'space'. I looked for a triangle key for ages... :/

My 1983 children's computer (www.smalltalk.org.br/fotos/pegasus1.jpg) used the same chipset but was most certainly not a CoCo clone (serial keyboard, network and other differences). I did study the CoCo technical manual for extra information about how to use the chipset. My 1988/1992 computer (www.smalltalk.org.br/fotos/casa1.jpg) used the ARM2 chipset but wasn't an Acorn Archimedes clone either. But it can be very hard to tell in these cases.

Great series Neil! I’m sure you’ve covered it previously, but what is the board holder you are using?

MGT released the Sam Coupe. They were based is Swansea, so this isn't the only Welsh computer. The Sam Coupe was a very polished affair in comparison. I am not completely sure where mine went. I think I lost it during a move!

Neil where did you get the gimble/clamp thing you used to hold the electronics whilst soldering? Clampy thing? Nice video mate thanks.

Every Dragon 32 has that bumpy Dragon logo sticker as a result of the way they were manufactured. Nothing wrong with a good clone as far as the consumer is concerned, that's how we ended up with IBM compatible PCs.

Hi, I’ve had a Dragon for a long time. Let me know if you want any pics. Books, software, copied games??

8:17 So, how come you didn't put the -5V regulator onto the heat sink. It was the one that failed after all, connector shenanigans aside...

Out of interest Neil, why isn't the 2nd voltage regulator mounted to the heatsink like the other one?

Re-watching this I noticed you put the screws in the wrong way around for the power port first time around at 7:25, but you seem to have realized this later. Why not replace the capacitor at C8?