[Coco] [Color Computer] Rainbow articles: EPROM emulator

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Mark Marlette wrote:
> Today an EPROM emulator or the use of an EPROM is so outdated, IMHO.

Depends how permenent it's ment to be, if the code's not going to 
change, then IMHO an EPROM is ok, especially as I have a truck load of 
pulls from old hardware and the like :)

But agreed for development work Flash is the way to go.

> FLASH is where it is at. Who wants a to unplug the device from the
> CoCo, open the device, remove the EPROM, wait 10 minutes while the
> device erases, reprogram on a special piece of hardware, that hardly
> anybody has, unless they live hardware  :), then reinstall EPROM and
> then reinstall the device in the CoCo?
> 
> Whew....not me..At Cloud-9 we put the power into the hands of the
> user. We are done programming the FLASH before you even have the case
> opened with an EPROM based device.

Well, that depends where you do the development work, I tend to take the 
philosopy of Nitros, that you may as well use modern tools on a modern 
pc to develop the code, in which case you either have to upload/transfer 
to the CoCo and flash, or flash it somewhere else and plug it in :)

> The SuperIDE already has four ROM areas in it's internal FLASH
> memory. The boot ROM can be set via switches or software selected
> after you boot and want to process another ROM bank. The Flash Bank
> Selection Register(FBSR) is either preserved or clear when the CoCo
> RESET button is pressed. This a configuration option is on the board
> as is a jumper to select a CoCo1-2 or CoCo3 mode as all CoCo's IO
> were not created equal.

How do you solve the problem that a lot of the modern flash roms need to 
be flashed 64K at a time ? I guess this is doable on the CoCo3, but what 
about the CoCo/Dragon machines that are limited to 64K ? Not that I've 
ever attempted to actually write to flash other than with my USB 
programmer, I'm asuming that there is some timing constraint on the 
write, and that you couldn't buffer to a disk file first ?

Cheers.

Phill.



-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.