[Coco] 2-meg mem capable 6809 before the gime and coco3?

[Wayne Campbell]

I found a copy of the MC6809 programming manual (from Motorola) on the Freescale Semiconductor site. I started reading through it. Boy, did it make me sit up when I read this:

MC6809-MC6809E Microprocessor Programming Manusl
Original Issue: March 1, 1981
Reprinted:      May, 1983
Section 1 - General Description
1.2 Features
Page 1-2

A Memory Management Unit (MMU), the MC6829, allows a M6809 based system to address a 2 megabyte memory space. NOTE: An arbitrary number of tasks may be supported -- slower -- with software.

This means the original CoCo could have been made in a way that would have blown away everything else around, with the exception of the 16-bit processors that were around by then. But DOS would have been kludging along with 640K while the CoCo would have been flying along at light-speed!

If you ask me, a CoCo4 would be parallel processing with 2 6809 processors and 4 6829 MMUs (that would be 8 megs of RAM per processor?), but then, I don't know anything about what would be required to make that hardware work.

Wayne