Well I know that I personally have never heard of this system, so I'm not sure how many other people have either.. Much less tried any emulator(s) that exists.
Hundreds of thousands of people certainly, maybe more. It was the best-selling microcomputer in either 1982 or 1983, out-selling even the ZX Spectrum for a few weeks. It was manufactured initially by the huge toy company Mettoy, which had specialised in die-cast metal model car toys. When the parent company started having financial difficulties, Dragon Data split off on its own. Mettoy went out of business in 1984. Dragon Data was bought by the General Electric Company but it was too late for Dragon Data, and they went into receivership and sold to a Spanish company called Eurohard in 1984.
GEC has in interesting history.
It had acquired a company called the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company (often called Ediswan). Ediswan was formed from the Swan Electric Light Company, so that Joseph Swan could sell his invention: the incandescent electric light.
Yes - that's correct.
Joseph Swan invented the light bulb.
Across the Pond, in the USA, a guy called Thomas Edison had also been doing research into the light bulb. Being a businessman, Edison patented his light bulb. However, Swan's company filed a lawsuit against Edison. The result was the merger of companies, with Edison allowed to produce his product (which was really, by then, a direct copy of Swan's product) in North America.
The Ediswan company was eventually (in 1886) acquired by GEC through various mergers over the years, and this resulted in spin-off companies including Thorn-EMI.
Coincidentally the American branch, the Edison Electric Light Company, was merged (ten years after GEC was formed) with another company and became General Electric in that country.
GEC survived until a merger in 1999 and eventually, one of the largest companies in the world, GEC split into and was bought by Marconi and British Aerospace.
Marconi didn't do too well a couple of years later, with the dot-com bubble.
But back to the Dragon! It was basically a clone of the Tandy CoCo, with Microsoft BASIC interpreter as its OS, and the MC6809E at its heart - making it amongst the first home micros to have 16-bit capability (the MC6809E had a 16-bit address bus).
What let the Dragon 32 down was bad timing and poor graphics capabilities. It was launched almost exactly the same time as the Commodore 64 was, and a few months after the launch of the Spectrum.
Development for a successor was inhibited by poor management - simply rehashing the same machine with double the RAM and adding an RS232 interface.
Even so, it was a computer that had pretty good support for games and was (for a while) taken seriously for business use as well. Part of the problem was the attempt to sell to as wide a market as possible, making the machine not quite a business tool, and not quite a gamers' computer. But it was very accessible and programmable.
Dragon 32 was a computer in the 70's a Tandy system,
Released in 1982, not the 1970s. It wasn't a Tandy system, though it was a clone. It was a 6809 system with a Microsoft OS.
I have a game rom I downloaded from a site called Kriegspiel for the Dragon 32 so I suppose my question is how can I run this ROM. It is supposed to be run on a dragon 32/64 emulator however I'm having trouble finding one that will work on my WinXP system.
Anyone who can point me in the correct direction I would be very greatful as I would dearly like to play it again!
Kriegspeil was GREAT! Personally, I use the MESS front end for MAME. Using the MESS program allows me to access the file manager etc, so I can load up a virtual cassette.
I think your post is pretty old. I was into the emulator scene years ago, and I'm kinda getting back into it now. If you're still around, or if anyone else is interested in Dragon 32 emulation, I hope this helps!
