The Dragon 64 is very similar to the Dragon 32 with 32K of extra memory and a new RS232C Serial port. Also the Dragon 63 had the OS9 operating system. The case color of the 64 is light grey, while that of the 32 was beige. All of the Dragon computers are very similar to the TRS-80 Color Computer (the CoCo 1). The similarities 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.

OS-9 was a real-time, multi-user, multitasking operating system developed by Microware for Motorola 6809-based machines in the early 1980s. It was designed with modularity in mind: core functions like process management, device drivers, and file managers were structured as separately loadable modules. This meant that OS-9 could be easily adapted to a wide variety of hardware configurations, and could run in environments with very limited memory. Its architecture made it suitable not only for home computers, but also for embedded systems and industrial controllers, where deterministic response and efficient use of hardware resources were crucial.

On the Dragon 64 (and compatible Dragon 32 systems with RAM upgrades), OS-9 Level One provided a Unix-like environment within the constraints of a 64 KB address space. It supported hierarchical directories, process scheduling, and a command-line shell, features rarely seen on 8-bit home computers at that time. Unlike the single-tasking BASIC ROMs most users were familiar with, OS-9 allowed multiple processes to run concurrently, enabling tasks like background printing while editing a document. The Dragon implementation relied on the 6809’s relatively advanced instruction set and efficient interrupt handling, making it possible to deliver true multitasking in a very constrained environment.

Although its user base on the Dragon was small compared to more consumer-friendly environments like DragonDOS or Extended Color BASIC, OS-9 appealed to advanced users and developers who valued its Unix-like design and flexibility. It became a development platform for higher-level languages such as C, and for utilities that benefitted from pre-emptive multitasking. The Dragon’s OS-9 port also helped demonstrate the 6809’s capabilities, as the processor was widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated 8-bit CPUs of its era. OS-9 would later evolve into Level Two for 6809 and 68000 machines, maintaining continuity between small hobbyist systems like the Dragon and larger professional workstations.

The MC6847 is a video display generator (VDG) first introduced by Motorola and used in the following machines (this is not a full list):

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.