[Coco] Why do a next Gen CoCo?

[Steve Bjork]

Mark,

Remember, the CoCo4 Project did include an CoCo1/2/3 emulator that would 
work most Color Computer without any mods.
But the emulator did not stop there.  You could also could also use the 
optional I/O card to hookup CoCo Joysticks, Floppy Disk controller card 
and other devices to the CoCo 4 system.  The I/O card would have its own 
Micro-CPU chip to talk to the CoCo hardware and USB interface to the 
PC.  Best of all, it was deign to fit inside a CoCo case and use the 
CoCo keyboard.  It would look and work just like a CoCo 3.

A new project that I've been toying with over the past few months (since 
all work has stop of the CoCo 4 project) is a Western Digital Floppy 
Disk controller emulator.  Instead of emulating the Floppy drive as 
others have done, I would emulate the WDFC data to the CPU.  Any program 
could work with the device without any mods.

For the CoCo, the device would be about the size of a rom pak and 
interface into a PC as a USB device.  Its operation would be like 
DriveWire without the need to mod DECB or OS-9.  An OS-9 driver could be 
written to talk to the device in a "native" mode for faster byte 
transfers.  (And be upto 8 times faster than drive wire too.)

The plan is to create a working device to the CoCo first and then 
release the design to public domain for others to use with their 
non-coco systems.

Steve Bjork

On 11/18/2010 4:16 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> Anything beyond what Steve is describing is, IMHO, so far removed from 
> a Coco as to be pointless. I'm not 100% sure of Steve's specifications 
> but I would imagine that his BASIC language is more of an extension to 
> DECB than a completely new language?!?
>