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For 26 years I have lived in the belief that my Dragon 32 had a Motorola MC6809E at it's core. So my surprise was rather big when I yesterday opened my Dragon, only to find a Hitachi HD6809EP instead. So now I'm wondering if this chip was exchanged during a repair return, or if Dragon Data really used the Hitachi from the factory? What chip do the rest of you have inside your Dragons?

Vato

I know one of mine has a Hitachi part - I think the rest are Motorola. Pretty sure I had a 68B09 in one of them, though I may have transplanted that from a CoCo long ago

Is the Hitachi a licenced product or is it a "clone"?

Vato

Vato wrote:For 26 years I have lived in the belief that my Dragon 32 had a Motorola MC6809E at it's core. So my surprise was rather big when I yesterday opened my Dragon, only to find a Hitachi HD6809EP instead. So now I'm wondering if this chip was exchanged during a repair return, or if Dragon Data really used the Hitachi from the factory? What chip do the rest of you have inside your Dragons?

Vato

They are not as rare as you might think. Over the years I have seen several factory sealed Dragon's with 6809E processors by Hitachi and Thomson installed in them. Now if it had been a 6309E chip, that would be a different story....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_6309

http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/C ... /6309.html

zephyr wrote:They are not as rare as you might think. Over the years I have seen several factory sealed Dragon's with 6809E processors by Hitachi and Thomson installed in them. Now if it had been a 6309E chip, that would be a different story....

zephyr,
No It's not that I thought the Hitachis are such rare items, it's more that I was surprised to find it in my Dragon, when I have read that basicly the whole Dragon concept was based around a Motorola design, hence the similarities with the Tandy CoCo. That made me wonder why they would use the main chip from another manufacturer, given their strong ties with Motorola. That's why I also asked if the Hitach was a licenced product or a clone. If it was a licenced product it might not be unlikely that they were supplied to Dragon Data through Motorola channels, if the Motorola factory couldn't cope with the demand.

Vato

Tandy had close ties with Motorola (hence all their custom variations on the chips), not sure about Dragon Data.

And I'm pretty sure it would have been licensed - I think the deal about the 6309 was that they weren't allowed to tell people about the extras as terms of their licence for that.

Hitachi licensed the rights for the 6809, at least that's what this page http://www.concentric.net/~alxevans/6309/intro.html says.

My Dragon 64 comes with a Hitachi 6809E too.

After checking a few of my D32's, I have found one of these in a 16x16 issue 6 board.

Here's the Hitachi HD68x09E data sheet...

And here's the data sheet for the awesome HD63x09E processor...