[Coco] Why do a next Gen CoCo? was Any news on the so called CoCo4 or NextCoCo

[Mark McDougall]

On 19/11/2010 10:28 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> First is preservation of the CoCo experience.. all those little things
> that make the CoCo the great system that it is.  Instant on, simple
> programming in both assembly and high level languages, hardware that
> is easy to interface with.. a platform that encourages
> experimentation.  Beyond the tangible details, there is just something
> special about turning on a CoCo and seeing that green screen.  I don't
> know how to put it into words properly, but I think the CoCo 'magic'
> is what keeps a lot of us interested in the platform.

You hit the nail right on the head - for me at least! :)

> The second goal is to just make doing CoCo stuff easier.  I personally
> am not interested in adding new capabilities as much as making it
> easier to access the existing ones. I am interested in being able to
> compile a C program in seconds rather than minutes, or a better
> debugging system, or to easily transfer program source back and forth
> between another computer for editing, or just to be able to easily
> share programs with other users.   I'm not so interested in creating
> new languages for the CoCo, after all there are a lot of choices in
> modern languages on modern platforms for just about any need.  Mostly,
> I just enjoy being able to use the existing languages more easily.

Bingo again!!!

> For me, the FPGA solution provides 90% of everything I'd want in a
> CoCo 4.  The remaining piece of the puzzle is interfacing with coco
> peripherals.  I don't know what is possible on that side of things.
> Having joysticks and a rompak connector would make the fpga solution
> complete in my eyes.  Maybe that is asking a lot :)

No, definitely not asking a lot. Just costly to implement in small 
quantities. The joystick no-so-much, you can easily add a gamecube or 
dreamcast controller to Coco3FPGA on the DE1.

Regards,

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