14 comments on “Dragon 32 Joystick adapter

  1. very nice, one correction I would like to make is that the dragon joystick ports use 240 degree 5 pin din

    • i meant in the picture for the diagram of the pinout, everything else is correctly saying 240 degree

  2. I’ve searched high and low, and can’t find any Dragon 32 Joystick adapters for sale. I’m not good at making one myself. Could you tell me where I can purchase one? That would be kind. It seems there was one produced back then, but I guess they rarely comes up on Ebay 🙁

    • They are really hard to find these days. Occasionally one pops up on eBay, but the Dragon wasn’t exactly a popular computer so accessories are rare compared to the equivalent C64/Spectrum items. That’s why I ended up building my own adapter. I couldn’t find a prebuilt one but did find someone selling a severed Dragon joystick cable.

      • Do you produce your adapter for sale? I just bought a Dragon 32 on Ebay with 2 working Joysticks, but I don’t really like them LOL
        So, the reason no one is making one for selling on, is that the market isn’t big enough? 🙁

  3. Thanks Vrai, I made my board using your design. Works perfectly. I upped a small video also.

  4. With the 2 Player Connector the Retro Adapter switches to dual joystick mode. In this mode the computer sees two separate joysticks attached, one for each player. You can then select one joystick per player in emulators.

  5. It is not easy to find out a 5 DIN 240 degree male socket so the easiest thing is to grab a 6 DIN and remove the center pin with solder heat or trim it.
    Can you confirm that the pinout of the 5 DIN and 9 SUB connectors are respectively from the female connector on the Dragon32 and on the Joystick?

  6. Hi,
    I did this adapter, all is working except the fire button :-(. I have checked a good continuity on the Fire pin to the board. Do I need to GND the fire input also?
    Thanks,
    Rick

    • The joystick will connect the fire pin to ground via the fire button switch (completing the circuit when fire is pressed. This works the same for Dragon and Atari style joysticks, so you only need to pass through the signal from the DIN to the DB9.
      You can check the fire button on the Dragon is working properly by just shorting the fire pin to ground on the computer. This will simulate holding the fire button down.

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