Thomson MO6

The Thomson MO6 was the successor of the MO5. The MO6 featured much more memory (128kByte of RAM) and had superior graphics. The 16 color palette could now be defined from a total of 4096 colors and new graphics modes did away with the 2 colors per 8 pixel constraint that caused the infamous "color-spill" in graphics.

The Thomson MO6 was sold in Italy as the Olivetti Prodest PC128 with some minor exterior changes.

New Video Modes

320x200 in 16 colors, 2 colors per 8 pixels
640x200 in 2 colors
320x200 in 4 colors, no color restraints
160x200 in 16 colors, no color restraints
320x200 in 3 colors, 1 transparent, no restraints
320x200 in 2 colors, two screen pages
160x200 in 5 colors with 3 transparency levels

These new video modes were made possible by the Thomson EF9369 Graphics Display Processor. This chip could draw 1 million pixels per second, which was very advanced for its time. The Commodore PET computers used a High Resolution Graphics board that was based on the EF9365 chip from Thomson.

Like its predecessors, the MO6 used Audio Cassettes for external storage, but an optional disk drive could be used as well. The machine was backwards compatible with the MO5.

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.