[Coco] CoCo Progression...

[David Gacke]

The reason I suggest moving the CPU outside and leaving the rest inside
are two-fold.

First, it's costly to put the core inside. The current open source 6809
version takes 300k gates by itself. This costs much more than an ARM
that's capable of emulating it.

Second, it's much easier to breathe new life into a possible CoCo 4
design by moving to a newer CPU, like an ARM. This gives you readily
available development tools like GCC and linux, not to mention many
other open source projects. But those aren't even necessary.


Anyway, to host USB it's not so bad. You can use a part like this one to
do it.

http://www.okisemi.com/jp/english/usb-hos1.htm


Finally, if you had a faster 6809 you'd still have no new software to
run on it and the old stuff wouldn't work either, plus a 64k segmented
memory architecture still and no modern development tools as an added
bonus!  ;)



Dave



-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com]
On Behalf Of Mark McDougall
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 8:00 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] CoCo Progression...

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!"

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