Difference between revisions of "Project Beta"

From The Dragon Archive
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Project Beta was something altogether different, and saw GEC Dragon really wanting to hit the big time. Expecting to retail at £2500-3000, the micro used twin MC6809E processors, had 256K RAM (expandable to 768K) and offered two internal 3.5" floppy drives with an external hard disc available as an add-on. Together with an on-board power supply the machine also incorporated an 80-column display and an RGB monitor connection with the following display resolutions: 320*256*16 colours, 640*512*4, 640*256*4, 320*256*4 and a teletext mode of 160*72 (teletext being 40*24 with each character a 4*3 block).  
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Project Beta was something altogether different, and saw [[GEC Dragon]] really wanting to hit the big time. Expecting to retail at £2500-3000, the micro used twin [[MC6809E]] processors, had 256K RAM (expandable to 768K) and offered two internal 3.5" floppy drives with an external hard disc available as an add-on. Together with an on-board power supply the machine also incorporated an 80-column display based on the [[MC6845]] and an RGB monitor connection with the following display resolutions: 320*256*16 colours, 640*512*4, 640*256*4, 320*256*4 and a teletext mode of 160*72 (teletext being 40*24 with each character a 4*3 block).  
  
 
[[File:DragonBetaTop.jpg|right|thumb|Dragon Beta Motherboard]]
 
[[File:DragonBetaTop.jpg|right|thumb|Dragon Beta Motherboard]]

Revision as of 18:22, 10 February 2010

DragonBeta-1.jpg
DragonBeta-2.jpg

Project Beta was something altogether different, and saw GEC Dragon really wanting to hit the big time. Expecting to retail at £2500-3000, the micro used twin MC6809E processors, had 256K RAM (expandable to 768K) and offered two internal 3.5" floppy drives with an external hard disc available as an add-on. Together with an on-board power supply the machine also incorporated an 80-column display based on the MC6845 and an RGB monitor connection with the following display resolutions: 320*256*16 colours, 640*512*4, 640*256*4, 320*256*4 and a teletext mode of 160*72 (teletext being 40*24 with each character a 4*3 block).

Dragon Beta Motherboard

The main CPU unit had a flat-top to support a monitor and the detached keyboard also featured a separate numeric pad. Together with a parallel Centronics, RS232, light-pen and mouse port, a mother-card was supplied providing expansion boards to be fitted. At the time of announcement only three had been fully developed: 1200/75 1200/1200 and 300/300 baud modem, quad serial port for OS-9 allowing multiple terminal access and a networking card allowing one machine to be used as a file-server to the others.

Dragon Beta next to Dragon 32

It is not known how many of these prototypes were built, only today one fully assembled Beta is known to exist and one working motherboard.