[Coco] CoCo Progression...

[Mark McDougall]

David Gacke wrote:

> One of the ways I see the CoCo could advance is via a hybrid emulator 
> perhaps.  Emulate the CPU with a small ARM or something, then attach an 
> FPGA to act like the REAL hardware in the rest of the system, instead of 
> trying to emulate it all. This way you could keep the boot time down, it 
> would be fast, since there's real hardware there and it's not being 
> emulated, plus the wish list of features like USB, etc. could actually be
> implemented.

I don't see why you'd need to emulate the CPU outside the FPGA - today's 
FPGAs have more than enough resources to emulate the entire CoCo on-chip.

The biggest impediment I can see to adding 'modern' devices is not so much 
the physical interfacing, but the software - devices need device drivers. At 
the risk of repeating myself ad-nauseum, I can't see USB *hosting* as being 
a viable option. The only possibility here would be to use a one-chip 
solution on-board and then use that as a basis to emulate, say, a CoCo disk 
drive. Then you could plug a 256MB USB flash stick into the CoCo...

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.optushome.com.au/msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"