Y Ddraig
Y Ddraig (Welsh for The Dragon) is my Motorola 68000 based computer. I the name Y Ddriag was chosen, as I had originally wanted to call it Dragon, but didn’t want to confuse it with Dragon Computer’s Dragon 32/64 6809 based computers from the 1980s.
This is a project that I have been developing in my spare time working on in my spare time over the last few years. The design was initially inspired by the Kiwi, a 68008 computer designed by Simon Ferber. The project started as a full 68000 version of the Kiwi but slowly evolved over time when trying new ideas components. Several iterations of the design were built and eventually changed before arriving at the current design.
The goal of the project is to create a computer, in the style of the 1980’s and early 1990’s computers which start almost instantly, have a basic Operating System built into the onboard ROM and maybe some form of BASIC so that software so software can be written with no external dependencies.
| Specifications |
|---|
| 68000 CPU running at 10Mhz. |
| 512K EEPROM |
| 1M of Static RAM |
| 8M Dynamic RAM |
| 2 Serial ports |
| Parallel port |
| PS/2 keyboard and mouse |
| IDE interface |
| Real-time clock |
| 4 Expansion slots |
Initially the software is being developed on a PC and cross compiled using GCC, VASM and VBCC. The longer-term plan is to have development tools available on the computer itself. While the main target of having everything fully available from the ROM, there are plans to have support for additional operating systems that can be loaded from disk.
Recent Posts:
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