[Coco] What would a CoCo successor have to have as a minimum?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Roger Merchberger
<zmerch-coco at 30below.com> wrote:

> Yes, the PC emulator could go much faster than the hardware, but as long as
> code created in the emulator ran in on the "upgraded" FPGA hardware that
> would be awesome.
>

I'm not sure where the idea that FPGA is slower than a PC came from,
but it's simply not true.

Here is a comparison between MESS and VCC on my (fairly) modern
2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 PC and the Altera DE1 running a simple
BASIC program.  I'm sure there are better ways to do benchmarking, but
I just wanted to show a simple point.

10 x=0
20 x=x+1
30 if x < 20000 goto 20
40 print "done"

MESS with throttle off takes 11.5 seconds
VCC with "overclock" all the way to the right, "89,4Mhz" takes 5.5 seconds
The Altera DE1 at 25Mhz takes 7.9 seconds

As you can see, even compared to a fairly powerful, modern PC, the DE1
(a low end FPGA board) is keeping pace just fine.
If you want the emulator based CoCo 4 to run on older or cheaper PCs,
at least for now, it would be the emulated platform that would be the
limiting element, not the FPGA platform.

Also, I'm surprised by how much faster VCC is in this test than MESS
is.  In actual use, I've not noticed much difference.  Could be this
test isn't very good :)  I just wanted to try and put things in
perspective.

-Aaron