[Coco] Why do we need a CoCo 4? (Long irrelevant rant)

[jdaggett at gate.net]

On 29 Dec 2008 at 18:05, BookWorm wrote:

> Who cares?
> 
> No offence intended, but I don't. I'm very much more interested in
> getting more out of the CoCo 3. It exists. As far as I can tell no
> actual CoCo 4-8 does, and it doesn't look like one ever will. Wouldn't
> all this daydreaming and speculative engineering be better spent on
> real products that do exist or that are worth the trouble of making?



No offense taken.

Not is totallity does a Coco4 exist. Or at least in hardware. Emmulators 
by far do a better job of what a Coco4 could be. Mark at Cloud9 has 
done a lot towards doing products that retro fit into the current Coco3. In 
that aspect your concern over effort is being addressed. 

>From my point, setting up a Coco3 with disk drives and MPI is not an 
option. As much as I would love to, I do not have the room at this time 
to do so. So where my ideas lead me towards a more compact Coco. 
Whether you call it a 3/4/5/.... is immaterial. My basic requirements 
would be small size and use a modern LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse 
and storage. I tend to lean towards USB drives and nonvolitile USB 
memory.  

In using a LCD monitor, I envision a base screen of 800x600 8bit color. 
Then DECB can operate out of a window of appropriate size depending 
on the setting of the HRES and CRES bits. There are other things that 
can be done. 

Remember ideas stimulate research which in turn become a reality. 
Albeit at times rather slowly. 

james