[Coco] Re: [Color Computer] What's wrong with this Picture

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/18/05 3:33:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
kevdig at hypersurf.com writes:

>If  we are voting, here are some other candidates::
>
>     1) not using a 68008 in the tre (backwards compatibility - who needs  
>that? could they have put a 6809 in a cart that could have itself had  
>rompaks plugged into it?)
Would have made MUCH more sense to keep the 6809 and make a ROMPAK with a  
68008 (as Chris Burke & Burke almost did as The Rocket).  If you think  that 
losing all the existing RomPaks and disk games and OS-9 L1 (and having to  forge 
a new contract with Microware for OSK) is no big deal, well...   Anyway, the 
68008 Pak could have been introduced after a few years of successful  Coco-III 
sales.

>    2) not using some of the fancier wires on the  6809
At least they could have been brought on to the connector, including the  DMA 
handshakes to allow a *really* no-halt disk controller.

>    3) the cm-8 - we deserved  better
An improved version, meaning a better CRT tube with finer dot pitch, could  
have been brought out, if the Coco had stayed in production.  As it was,  the 
CM-8 was a *tremodnous* improvement over any TV set, and needed for  80-column 
text.

>    4) tre should have had a switching  PS
Another improvement that would have come along eventually as a cost  
reduction.  Yep, eliminating that heavy 60 Hz transformer saves lots of  expensive 
copper and iron.

>    5) sloppy peripheral decoding (using 32 precious  addresses when 4 would 
do)


I agree.  That screwup must have saved a couple 14-pin ICs in the One,  and 
then all the existing software that took advantage of the sloppy decoding  
prevented fixing it.  *That* might have been a good place to "screw legacy  
software", especially 3rd-party non-Tandy stuff.
 
--Mike K.