[Coco] The COCO 5, some ideas...

[Michael Robinson]

http://www.axess.com/twilight/sock/cocofile/coco4.html

This design could be adapted further with a more modern bus technology
such as PCI.  I like that this person is contemplating multiple CPU's
in a next gen COCO.  Why did the Tomcat and MM/1 fail?  Maybe they
failed because they weren't a) compatible enough with the COCO3 and
b) advanced enough.

I propose a coco clone that has 16 bit sound hardware, a built in multi
pak with three 40 pin connectors and three updated connectors for a new
cartridge standard.  This clone should come in a tower configuration.
In addition to the two standard joystick ports I propose having a total
of four and designing a new joystick port that you can plug the old 
joysticks into which will take more modern fancier joysticks.  I propose
designing the processor to run in 6809BE mode where poke
65497,[0123456789] could kick the processor into higher speed modes.
I propose reverse enginering the Microware/Microsoft rom and making 
the new Rom 30% different from the old one to avoid copyright problems.
Instead of running 30 pin simms which are disappearing rapidly, I
propose going to either PC100 DIMMS or something else that is more
recent.  The faster the ram, the faster the processor can be.

Advantages of a modern hardware COCO clone:

No drives needed.  Just like the COCO 3, make this clone 
work on a standard television without hard drives and 
disk drives.

Run COCO3 software, Gauntlet II and games like it might be 
notable exceptions.

Use old style joysticks and rom paks where a software emulator
won't work.

With modern flash cards holding 16+ megs, build a GUI system 
in flash memory.  More reliable and faster than a hard disk.

With modern technology, build an 8 core 16/32/64 bit 6809
compatible processor that can handle meatier programs.

16 bit stereo quality sound, standard.

More joysticks, better for gaming.