[Coco] COCO FPGA

[Frank Pittel]

My understanding is that work is being done to allow access to the SD card on the
altera de1 board with coco3fpga. In my case I've been using drivewire with my
physical coco for a long time and am doing what I can to move away from physical
floppies as fast as I can. As a result I never considered needing to connect to a
physical machine as a limitation.

The Other Frank


On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:23:46AM -0500, Frank Swygert wrote:
> I agree, but this means that another computer must be used with the CoCo3FPGA for any storage. That makes it a bit less desirable as a CoCo replacement, but since the CoCo can't connect directly to the internet I suppose another computer will always be necessary to some degree. I think it is still imperative that the computer be able to function without another computer. Emulating floppy and/or hard discs with the SD card slot is probably the best way to do that -- just not currently implemented. Maybe going through Drivewire (since that's built in, I think) to the SD card would be possible? Is there a way to detect when an SD card is present? I'm not familiar enough with SD card electronics to know. Would be nice if Drivewire could be programmed to look to the SD card when present instead of the serial port.
> 
> Hmmm.... how hard would it be to make a small stand-alone board that could access an SD card and plug into the serial port? Could that be done cheaply enough with something like an Arduino? It would have to run a version of DW in order to work, so that would have to be ported/written, but that might be the easiest to implement stand-alone storage. Then one could plug into the SD card box or a regular computer. Or could something like this be programmed into the FPGA on the DE-1 board and use the SD slot already there??
> 
> --------------------
> Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:00:31 -0600
> From: Frank Pittel<fwp at deepthought.com>
> 
> The coco3fpga connects to a computer via drivewire so things like the
> SuperIDE, and other floppy controllers aren't of much use.
> 
> -- 
> Frank Swygert
> Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
> Magazine (AMC)
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> 
> 
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