The Dragon is back in the UK - but it has left its Mettoy toytown image far behind. The new exclusive distributor in the UK, Compusense, is promoting the Dragon 64 with disk drives as an entry level Flex or OS9 machine.

Since the collapse of Dragon Data last year the Dragon range has been re-born in Spain through a company called Eurohard. Largely owned by the Spanish Government, Eurohard has put Dragon machines back into production and plans new systems. But the original Dragon, the 32, has been pronounced dead, and the image of the Dragons returning to the UK is going to change wholesale.

"We'll try to support the 32 as far as we can," said Tadeus Opyrchal, director of Compusense. But he stressed that the 32 has almost no future as far as developments from the manufacturer are concerned, and that the Dragon name will come to stand for a quite different type of system.

"We will aim for semi-professional users with the 64 and disk drives," he said. "One of the areas where the 6809 processor is particularly strong is in technical and scientific use - a 64 with drives will do the same job as a much larger machine."

Compusense is a software house specialising in the Flex operating system, a kind of cut-down Unix for 8-bit micros. Its Dragon package, a 64 with disks, OS9, and accounts software, will cost between £600 and £700. Compusense aims to offer this with Flex as well.

"In the long term, we're here to keep Eurohard's and Dragon's presence in the UK," said Opyrchal. That could mean that when new systems start to roll off the Spanish company's production line there will be a natural route for them to the UK. A revamped 64, the D200, is due to be shown at the forthcoming 6809 show, and later in the year a 128K machine should follow.

Eurohard, which bought the rights to the Dragon systems (issue 74) last autumn, also has a networking system operating in Spain. It even holds an MSX licence, but Opyrchal sees no future in bringing a Spanish MSX machine to the UK.

"We're taking things as they come," he said. "We see the Dragon as a low-cost entry level Flex machine."

Compusense isn't committed to sell Dragons in quantity, but Opyrchal waxes evangelical on the subject of the system. He also claims to have ground concessions out of Eurohard on prices, saying that the machines' prices on the continent are about twice as high as the price tags he'll attach.