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

[John Kent]

I designed the 6809 core because I wanted to learn how the chip worked 
rather than just relying on a prepackaged part.
The advantage of FPGAs hardware is that they can can perform the logic 
operations in parallel rather than the sequential approach of most PC 
computers. You do have multi-core CPUs these days, but I would imagine 
most emulators are single threaded.

The advantage of 8 bit computing is that the software is reasonably 
simple and easier to understand than say Linux on a PC.

The same thing applies to designing the FPGA CPU core. It's reasonably 
complex, but still in the realm of an individual to design. There is no 
way I could design something as complex as a modern day CPU, but I can 
experiment and learn about many of the principles used by modern PCs 
such as caching, shared memory and multicore processors and so on using 
relatively simple hardware designs.

I'm not sure what control Gary wants to maintain over his FPGA design. 
If he wants to maintain ownership then it really dependent on which 
direction Gary wants to take it. I think he has enough on his plate as 
it is without people making more demands on him. I guess that is the 
advantage of software emulation. There are more programmers out there to 
work on the software. I don't think that both approaches are mutually 
exclusive. it just depends on where you see the benefits are from 
working on it.

JK.

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