Making a Dragon 32 Joystick

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The PC joystick and DIN plug Connecting the DIN plug Testing the joystick with "Ghost Attack"

The Dragon 32 is a home computer from the early 1980s, based on the Motorola 6809 CPU chip. One of the features of the Dragon 32 (and the Tandy Color Computer) is the analog joystick port. There are two 5-pin DIN sockets on the side of the machine, for connecting two joysticks. Many of the games for the Dragon were written so that they required the use of a joystick, and would not work at all without one. I found this was a problem when preparing a Dragon 32 for display at Tech Adventure in Bristol, because I had a couple of ROM-cartridge based games that I could not run.

It's quite easy to convert a joystick that was intended for use with the joystick port of a PC-compatible machine and make it work with the Dragon 32.

Photos of my Dragon 32 joystick conversion are available in this Flickr set.

Sites with useful information about the Dragon 32, especially pinouts:
Dragon Socket Pinouts
Dragon/Coco Ports


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