The Dragon 32, or a TRS-80 CoCo?

The Dragon 32 was introduced in 1982. The computer was very similar to the TRS-80 Color Computer (the CoCo 1). The computer was produced by Dragon Data in Wales, by Eurohard in Spain and by Tano in Louisiana USA. The Dragon 32 came with 32KByte of memory and was upgradable to 64KByte. The differences with the TRS-80 Color Computer were small enough that a significant amount of software written for the CoCo could run on both. BASIC tokens are different, but if a program was re-tokenized, the software would typically run without too many changes. In fact the Dragon BASIC version is almost identical to Tandy's Color Computer Extended Basic. There are only a few tweaks in order to access certain Dragon features.

It is even possible to permanently convert a Color Computer into a Dragon by swapping the Orinal Color Computer ROM and rewiring the keyboard cable. The dragon also has a centronics parallel printer port, that was not present on the TRS-80 Color Computer.

The Dragon's main display mode is a black on green quarter-tile block mode. There are also five high-resolution modes, named PMODE 0 to 4. The highest resolution possible is 256x192 in monochrome. The lower resolutions allow for more color.

The dragon originally started out life as a 16K prototype code named "Pippin" (hand built by PA Technology in Cambridge in October 1981) as part of project SAM and has started production when Sinclair launched their 48K Spectrum Computer.

The prototype was almost identical in design to the Dragon 32 that became the launch machine. What is not commonly known is that the 1st 10,000 Dragons were manufactured as 16K machines. The decision to move to 32K came too late in the process to change the production run and these machines had to have a 16K "piggy-back" RAM board fitted at the factory to make the Dragon 32.

Video - Motorola MC6847 VDG

The Motorola MC6847 is a versatile Video Display Generator (VDG) introduced in 1978, designed to interface between microprocessors and television circuitry. It was a staple of early 8-bit computing, most notably powering the TRS-80 Color Computer and the Dragon 32/64 The chip is capable of generating both alphanumeric text and bitmapped graphics in several distinct modes, utilizing an internal ROM for character generation or external RAM for high-resolution graphics. It outputs a composite video signal in NTSC format, though variants like the MC6847Y and MC6847P were used for different clocking and signal requirements.

Hardware Interface and Signal Logic

The MC6847 operates on a 3.579545 MHz clock—the standard NTSC colorburst frequency—which it uses to derive all internal timing for horizontal and vertical synchronization. It features an 8-bit data bus and a series of mode-select pins (GM0, GM1, GM2, S/A, Int/Ext, CSS that determine the display format. Because the VDG and the CPU (often the MC6809) must share access to the same bank of video RAM, the chip provides a Device Busy (DB) signal or works in tandem with a synchronous address multiplexer (like the MC6883 SAM) to prevent "snow" or bus contention during the active display cycle.

Alphanumeric and Semigraphics Modes

In its base Alphanumeric mode, the MC6847 displays a 32x16 grid of characters. It features an internal character generator ROM that produces a limited 5x7 pixel font within an 8x12 pixel block. A unique feature of this chip is its Semigraphics modes (SG4, SG6, SG8, SG12, etc.), which divide each character block into smaller "pixels" or sub-blocks. For instance, Semigraphics 4 divides a block into a 2x2 matrix, allowing for a pseudo-graphics resolution of 64x32 while still treating the data as ASCII-like character bytes, which significantly reduces the memory overhead for the host system.

High-Resolution Graphics and Color Palette

The chip’s true bitmapped graphics modes, referred to as "Full Graphics," range from Resolution Graphics One (RG1) at 64x64 pixels to High-Resolution Graphics Six (RG6) at 256x192 pixels. At its highest resolution, the MC6847 is limited to a monochrome (two-color) display due to the 6KB memory ceiling of the addressing scheme. In lower-resolution modes, such as 128x192, it supports a four-color palette. The color selection is governed by the Color Set Select (CSS) pin, which toggles between two hardware-defined palettes:

Palette 0: Green, Yellow, Blue, Red.
Palette 1: Buff (White), Cyan, Magenta, Orange.

Memory Addressing and Video Synthesis

The MC6847 does not have internal RAM; instead, it generates a 13-bit address bus (DA0–DA12 to fetch data from external memory. As the electron beam scans the television screen, the VDG continuously cycles through the memory locations, converting the retrieved bytes into a serial bitstream. This stream is then processed by the internal luminance (Y) and chrominance (phi-A, phi-B) modulators. Because the chip was designed for cost-effective home electronics, it handles the complex task of NTSC color encoding internally, requiring only a minimal external buffer and an RF modulator to produce a signal a standard television can interpret.

CPU - The Motorola 6809

The Motorola 6809 is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.