[Coco] Cococompatible monitors... [Now CoCo3FPGA, FPGA Development, and GIME replacement]

[Joel Ewy]

On 07/05/2011 10:12 AM, gene heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 05, 2011 11:07:17 AM Joel Ewy did opine:
>
>> On 07/05/2011 09:04 AM, gene heskett wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, July 05, 2011 09:50:20 AM John Kent did opine:
>>>> On 5/07/2011 3:36 AM, gene heskett wrote:
>>>>> And this DE1 board I assume has a cost of?  URL please John.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers, gene
>>>> Terasic DE1 is here:
>>>> http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=83
>>> No doubt capable, but way too big to hide in a cc3 unless the whole
>>> coco was emulated.
>>>
>>>> It uses an Altera Cyclone II.
>>>> It's what Gary uses for his CoCo3FPGA.
>>>>
>>>> He has also used the Digilent Spartan 3 starter board in the past too
>>>> using the Xilinx 1000Kgate Spartan 3
>>>> http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=S3BOARD
>>> That maybe could be hidden under the keyboard.  With a vga output no
>>> less.
>> I can attest to the fact that the Digilent Spartan 3 board will
>> comfortably fit in a CoCo 3 case:
>> http://8littlebits.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/an-old-case-for-a-new-coco/
>>
> Now that is, as they said 100 years ago, cooking with gas.  But I didn't
> see a disk drive?  Did you figure on drivewire doing all that?
>

Gary has put an integrated 'hardware' Drivewire client into Coco3FPGA.  
This uses an unmodified DECB ROM image.  The CoCo doesn't know it's not 
talking to a FDC.  And CoCo3FPGA can talk Drivewire at something like 
430K.  At the current state of development there are no mass storage 
options other than Drivewire for CoCo3FPGA.  I think it would be nice to 
see some kind of flash memory device so the thing can stand on its own.  
But if/when Gary puts the source back out there, somebody will likely 
add that if he doesn't himself.

>>> Would I have to run the development system on windows?  If yes, no
>>> deal.
>> The software runs under Linux.  It's a 970M download.
> Great, not a problem as I have 4 terrabytes of drives here.  URL?
>

This is the only thing I have bookmarked:  
http://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.htm

Now, I only downloaded the 900M one instead of the 4G one where they 
have high resolution JPEGs and a Bio of each logic gate.  When I 
originally set up my CoCo3FPGA system I tried an earlier version of 
Webpack on Win2K.  I finally figured out how to get that to work just to 
upload the bit file.  That machine has suffered a hardware failure, and 
I'm just not using MS-Windows enough these days (other than fixing other 
people's malware-infested boxes) to bother reconstituting it.  Gary's 
got a new version with pretty 4096-color graphics, so I downloaded the 
Linux version (I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on this machine) for the 
upgrade.  Unfortunately, the Digilent board requires hardware 
modification for the new colors, and that simply hasn't gotten done yet.

Like John K. says, you've got to register with them and do a deal with 
Rumplestiltskin for your firstborn child, but no money changes hands, 
and they haven't come to collect Henry yet.

JCE

> Thanks Joel.
>
> Cheers, gene