[Coco] ...speaking of emulation on the CoCo

[John Kowalski]

Robert Emery wrote:
> Just throwing this out there for conversational purposes. A while back we were
> discussing the possibility of emulating the Vectrex on a CoCo, and ISTR it was
> mentioned that the Vectrex has two processors... one for the main program and
> one to calculate vectors (in the background?) It was not totally ruled out
that
> the CoCo3 could do it, but seemed doubtful.

The Vectrex didn't actually have two processors - it just had a 6809 running
at 1.5Mhz and some extra hardware to assist with vectors, but I think the
6809 had to spend a lot of processor time babysitting the vector hardware.
This is why I think it should be possible to run Vectrex games on the CoCo3
- Good software manually drawing lines on a bitmapped screen might still run
as fast as the Vectrex's own vector routines.

 
> It got me to wondering if it would be possible to connect two CoCo's together
> via the cartridge port to form a sort of dual-processor CoCo, with one of them
> becoming a "slave" to the other's instructions.

Unless two CoCo's shared a good portion of the memory map, you'd probably
lose the advantages of having two CPUs to the overhead required in having
them constantly communicating data to each other.  In any case, it would be
neat, but too much cost or trouble to expect from all but the most die-hard
CoCo users.

                                         John Kowalski (Sock Master)
                                         http://www.axess.com/twilight/sock/