Dragon 200E for the Spanish Market
The Dragon 200E is functionally and technically the same as the Dragon 200. The Dragon 200E (Espana) had a piggiback board that sits on the 6847 VDG socket and contains the VDG and a new character ROM that changed the lowercase characters to spanish language characters with accents and other symbols.
Motorola MC6847 Video Display Generator
The MC6847 is a video display generator (VDG) first introduced by Motorola and used in the following machines (this is not a full list):
- TRS-80 Color Computer
- Dragon 32/64
- Laser 200
- TRS-80 MC-10/Matra Alice
- NEC PC-6000 series
- Acorn Atom
- APF Imagination Machine
The VDG is a relatively simple display generator compared to other display chips of the time. It is capable of displaying alphanumeric text, semigraphics and raster graphics contained within a roughly square display matrix 256 pixels wide by 192 lines high.
The ROM includes a 5 x 7 pixel font, compatible with 6-bit ASCII. Effects such as inverse video or colored text (green on dark green; orange on dark orange) are possible.
The MC6847 is capable of displaying nine colors:
- black
- green
- yellow
- blue
- red
- buff (almost-but-not-quite white)
- cyan
- magenta
- and orange
CPU View - 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.
ROM: 16kB Sound Chip none Sound 1-bit sound Display Chip MC6847 Video Display Generator Display 64x192 semi-graphics 4 color
256x192 Mono graphics Best Text 32x22 Best Color 8 colors Graphics 256x192 in 2 colors Sprites none System OS Microsoft Extended BASIC