[Coco] Sneak peek

[Roger Taylor]

At 01:58 PM 2/14/2009, you wrote:
>Roger,
>
>Ah  see your point of view now. Thanks for the explanation of what 
>ROM you are using.
>
>I am pretty sure you didn't do the hardware design or lay the board 
>out. Not picking on you but I can tell in some of your posts you are 
>not a hardware guy.

I got seriously into digital electronics back when I was probably 16 
or so.  I'm 40 now.  You'd be amazed at what I really know.  I 
remember finally burning my ancient yellow-paged notebooks filled 
with hand-drawn schematics that started as a teen.  As for asking 
CoCo questions, when we've got a large group of smarties among us 
(including us), I see no reason why anyone should assume that since a 
person is asking a general question that the person must be wet 
behind the ears.  In the almost 20 years of being on these CoCo lists 
and lucky enough to hang out with such a smart group, I've seen some 
of the smartest people ask some of the "dumbest" questions about some 
of the "simplest" things.  Notice I quoted those words because nobody 
is actually asking DUMB questions, but some of the readers ASSUME 
that Person A or B in their question or response, is the DUMB one in 
the conversation.  It's just basic E-Mail 101 that goes back to the 
BBS days when everything we said (if not followed by a SMILEY, or not 
overly explained with apologies) was considered down-right rude.

:)




>Not James but james. Anyone that follows this list knows EXACTLY 
>whom I am referring to.

I guess I've been too busy to know to which James or james you're 
referring to, but the answer is still No.



>I would tend to disagree with you on the statement of: ACIA or UART 
>the CoCo loves best, and that would be the 6551. Believe me, the 
>CoCo would LOVE a bigger buffer, so would the host!!

OS-9 and the 6551 might not have been a wise combo back in the day, 
but I've never had a problem under Disk BASIC or my own ML 
programs.  I guess it's all in the code and the choice of operating system.


>The Atmel design work I am doing can cause a 3.2GHZ Dual core, blah, 
>blah laptop to loose data if I don't invoke hardware handshaking at 
>230.4Kbaud. If the PC doesn't do anything else all is fine but if I 
>start to run some REALLY big hardware compilers and push the 
>performance of the machine, the PC can't keep up with a $8 chip.

I've almost always got 8+ apps running at once on the PC and I agree 
that when the CPU gets bogged down, even the simplest serial I/O can 
lose it's cool.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com