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

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/25/2010 3:00:37 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
asa.rand at gmail.com writes:


>I've been reading this thread with much enthusiasm. I would like to see  a 
>CoCo4 come about. The issue of compatability, as well as  functionality, 
has 
>been a hot topic. In it all, the recurring idea is  that the resulting 
>hardware and software must as closely approximate the  CoCo experience as 
>possible.
 
 
I have been following this thread too and I must say I like the coco
as much for its limitations as for its abilities.
 
The best improvements to the coco have already been made in 
the area of mass storage.  I have zip drives that I use
 as removable hard drives
on all of my operational coco's.  No partitioning to complicate
things.   The coco never enjoyed decent mass storage until
the first IDE and SCSI interfaces were introduced.
 
I for one will not miss a Coco4 if it never happens but if
it should I would hope it remained true to the experience
of using a real Coco.   Logical improvements should be 
made like extending the Gime support of task registers
to 8 bits for a proper level II system consisting of 2 MB
as specified by Motorola in its original design of such a system.
Also extending the graphics support into this added memory.
 
Graphics could be extended to 256 colors but this is less
important than the address expansion.
 
Basically what I am talking about is reversing the 
crippling measures imposed by
Tandy on the Coco3 so it would not compare favorably with
their MSDOS machines.
 
Throw in the faster system clock speeds available with
modern components and I would be satisfied.
 
Roy