The Dragon Professional or Project Alpha is an upgraded Dragon 64. The Professional has a built-in modem, multi-channel AY sound chip and disk interface with two 3.5" drives. A new boot ROM with graphical screen for booting to ROM based basic, which was called the Dragon 32 Mode, or boot into OS-9.

This machine never left the prototype stage, and a number of early prototypes had a hand made case in a darker color. Some pre-production prototypes have only the top of the case slightly darker than the Dragon 64.

A new version of OS-9 was developed to interface with the new hardware and the modified disk drive interface. The Dragon Dos boot disk (Dragon Dos 2.F) provided compatibility with the Dragon 32 + Dragon Dos interface and the machine was capable of running a large amount of dragon disk software. Booting straight to basic mirrored the original Dragon 32 and most tape software would load and execute without issue. The machine also has an updated monitor port, which in addition to the Dragon 64 composite video also has RGB output

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.