Description :

It's the fourth Dragon Meetup, hosted again at The Centre for Computing History.

This year the Meetup will be twice as good! For the first time, we're going to run the event over both days of the weekend. So why not come twice? We'll also have social events on the Saturday evening.

The Dragon was always a programmer's machine. With a proper keyboard, a good basic and a great processor (the 6809), plus a simple architecture, the Dragon was the introduction into programming for many a bedroom coder.

This year we're going to celebrate this, and make it all about the software. The Dragon might have had a limited colour palette, less than impressive sound and no sprites - but that didn't stop a huge range of games being developed and ported to this machine. We're going to have a huge variety of games on show - including, hopefully, every Microdeal game ever published - and hold some competitions to see who's the best Dragon games player!

The Dragon wasn't just about games of course. We'll be showing Dragon 64s running Flex and OS/9, the two professional operating systems available in the 80s, plus 80 column Dragon Plus systems to show the machine's true potential. We'll even be running a version of multi-user Unix!

Of course, it's not all about the past. The Dragon is still a simple machine to program, and new software is being produced all the time. Come meet the people who still develop new games and utilities and see the very latest software!

We'll still have plenty of hardware on show. There'll be VGA, RGB and 80 Column upgrades, plus a first chance to see the new Sprite board too. There'll also be the Draco (both Dragon and Tandy Color Computer!) and a range of other upgrades.

Hopefully we'll also have some Dragon Alpha prototypes, the Thorn EMI Liberator and other exotic Dragons and peripherals from the last 35 years.

To mark Brexit we've also invited some French cousins over - Roy Templeman will have his collection of 6809 machines from across the channel, including Thomsons and Matra Alices. We'll also have other 6809 machines from around the world.

If you have a Dragon or other 6809 machine you'd like to bring or some software you'd like to demonstrate, please drop a line to tony@computinghistory.org.uk - we'd love to hear from you.

Time: 10am - 5pm on Saturday and Sunday. Social events on Saturday TBA.

* Concessions include Students, OAPs, Disabled and Carers.

* Family entry is for 2 Adults and 2 Children.