 Dragon Data started the production of the Dragon 32 in Late 1982. The Dragon 32 was the first computer that the company had produced. It was a successful machine, since other rival companies had difficulty in supplying their machines to customers. The CPU worked on a frequency of 0.9Mhz, but when the machine uses a DMA channel with the CPU in Halt Mode it is also possible to double the frequency for faster transfer rates. Some machines were released to use the 1.78MHz frequency, but after a while the CPU crashes because of heating problems. On the first place the machine had to be released with only 16K Ram, but after the announcement that Spectrum were releasing a 48K machine, Dragon Data decided to release the machine with 32K of Ram.
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| Dragon 32 |
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UK: £175 later it was sold around £100
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| Boxed: 209146 DG |
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| 1982 |
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| Motorola 6809E running at a frequency of 0.9Mhz. |
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| 16 Kbytes Rom containing the full version of Microsoft colour BASIC. 32Kbytes Ram not expandable. |
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| Medium Beige plastic case with a very strange case and large Multi-Colour Dragon-32 label. The keyboard is a full size 53 keys, typewriter non standard QWERTY style. |
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A 6847 chip is used to produce graphic and text displays of:
256×192 with 2 colours, text is displayed at 32×16,
128×192 with 2 or 4 colours, text is displayed at 16×16,
128×96 with 2 or 4 colours, text is displayed at 16×8. |
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| For sound the Dragon 32 uses a 6-bit DAC CPU controlled chip. The Chip is capable of producing 64 different levels of volume with speech and sample recording capabilities, but since the chip is controlled by the CPU sample quality is not very impressive. |
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1 x Cartridge port,
2 x Analogue joysticks,
1 x Tape recorder running at 1200 bps,
1 x Parallel Centronics printer port,
1 x RF connector (Audio & Video),
1 x RGB monitor. |
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| External power supply with an output voltage of 18 and 12v. |
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| Dimensions 325mm x 375mm x 90mm (W x L x H) Weight Approx 2Kg. |
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Around 65,000 Units where sold and others did not make it on the market, due to company bankruptcy.
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