[Coco] COCO4 Emulator

[Mark McDougall]

James Hrubik wrote:

> So what is the point of emulation?  It has to run on a PC  or Mac.  At 
> this point, both are Intel based.  If you skip the emu part, the 64K 
> (maybe now 64G) question is -- can Nitros9 be ported to run from boot off
> an Intel machine?  If so, you have your CoCo 4, 5, 6, ad infinitum. 

I've got to admit, I tend to agree with James and am having trouble seeing 
the point of it all?!?

It would be a *very* different kettle of fish if John were proposing an 
actual, physical Coco 4 - I can definitely see the utility and outright 
'cool' factor of doing that!

However, if you're going to limit it to emulation - then what's the point? 
As James suggested, porting NitrOS9 to intel would be a more sensible 
exercise, and at the end of it all, probably no more effort than a CoCo 4 
emulation with the proposed features. NitrOS9 is going to be a lot cleaner 
and easier to expand running in a 2GB address space, than a memory-managed 
(bank-switched) 64KB address space of an emulated 6809. And of course once 
you have NitrOS9 running on intel, you have instant access to all manner of 
peripherals and source code - including a plethora of IP stacks, sound 
drivers, etc.

And why even bother trying to maintain backwards-compatibility? So you want 
to play a CoCo game on the same box - simply run one of the existing CoCo 
emulators!?!

Again, I'm not poo-pooing John's idea for a Coco 4 - just saying that if 
it's worth doing, then it's worth doing in real hardware. Whether or not 
that's an FPGA or heavily-modified Coco 3 is another matter...

Regards,

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