[Coco] The X9

[Mark McDougall]

Chuck Youse wrote:

> My apologies, it WAS a bit gruff and unwarranted

Accepted.

> The SoC CoCo has been done (as you pointed out), and frankly, if we're
> going to just put everything in one FPGA, why don't we just run this
> stuff in emulators?  That's just not fun.  You are (I assume) an EE.
> Why do _you_ think it would be fun?

I can sort of see your POV, but to me, the flexibility of design and 
re-configurability on-the-fly are big selling points. As an EE, I like the 
idea of being able to spin a board early on and still leave a lot of options 
available for the finished product. I don't really see much difference 
between laying down a 16550 and instantiating a 16550 VHDL core in an FPGA.

At the end of the day, you still have a physical PCB to which you can attach 
real coco carts, real coco disk drives and a modem - regardless of whether 
or not the PCB contains 1 chip or 10. And that's still different (for me) 
again to running a Coco emulator on a PC.

I guess having a very broad range of retro interests, a 'generic' FPGA 
solution is attractive to me because it can be used for a variety of 
platforms. I have the same PCB running Apple II, BBC, C64, TRS-80, Coco and 
Amiga designs, plus many more.

> I could go off on a little tangent about modern comp sci grads or
> professional "programmers" who seem unable to churn out even the
> simplest of code without requiring ungodly amounts of RAM and CPUs
> running in the GHz range for even modest performance.  Same principle
> applies.

I agree!

> Yes, don't bother, as I'll be keeping my mouth shut.  There is no market
> for my 'archaic' projects anyway - I've been working on them to pass
> some time and make my CoCo usable (for instance, I didn't have a floppy
> controller) as an amateur radio base station; things don't really get
> interesting in EE until radio, anyway..

You'd be surprised. I find most 'archaic' (retro) projects interesting, and 
regardless of the perceived market I think you'll find there are others 
interested in what you're doing. I wouldn't tackle the problems the same way 
as you do, but they're interesting none-the-less.

Regards,

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