[Coco] MCC-216

[Frank Swygert]

Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:05:29 -0600
From: Allen Huffman<alsplace at pobox.com>

On Jan 1, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Frank Pittel<fwp at deepthought.com>  wrote:

> There are game pads and joysticks available for the mcc-216. From what I can tell there's a usb port of some sort so we
> should be able to connect it to a pc for drivewire support. Then again with an SD card slot it might be better to have
> a drivewire type of server in the box using the SD card. I can get 16GB cards for less then $10. Imagine 16Gig of disk
> on a coco with no external drive connections. Personally if cartridges could be "installed" into the 2MB of flash I'd be
> happy to lose the slot.

DriveWire is great, but ideally we still need something with full compatibility. RGB-DOS/HDB-DOS/B&B etc. cannot work with all software. Emulation of an FD1773 (or whatever it is) floppy controller that then turns in to SD storage would still be best.

Another issue is how easy is it to clone copy protected discs. At this point, perhaps "everything" exists and has been cloned to disk images, but if I were to get such a virtual CoCo, I'd want to sit down and start feeding my huge boxes of 5 1/4" floppies in to the thing making my own images. True FD1773 could let me read my 42 track discs (I did that alot with patches to DECB and OS-9 to get more storage), 80 track discs, etc.

Other than potential mysteries inside the GIME (if there are any), hardware emulation of a CoCo via FPGA seems like the best best, but if it cannot use true CoCo hardware, it might as well be a small X86 box running MESS.

With the Commodore 64-on-a-chip product (the joystick), Atari 2600-on-a-chip product (Flashback 2) and various Nintendo-on-a-chip products, I wonder what approach they took to emulate full systems like that?
-
Allen Huffman
======================================================

I'm not so sure I agree. I understand your predicament, but then you were a software developer. Most people don't have lots of disks they need to copy. In your case you might want to scour thrift stores and find and old 486 box with a real 5/25" floppy and try to find a 360K drive to stick in it. There are free DOS versions now, or you could run Linux and do some customizing to create virtual images of the disks then use DriveWire or SD cards to copy the stuff over. Making the box a dedicated emulator or dedicated DriveWire server might be a good option. In that case you might want a Pentium or P-4. Supporting the 360K drive will limit how new the hardware can be and what OS you use. I think P-2 boards would still support a 360K drive, but I don't know about P-3. I'm reasonably sure 360K support was dropped by the time P-4 boards were out. But then you have the little computers like the RPi that would work well for a DW server or dedicated emulator...

The MCC-216 relies on floppy emulation and uses the SD card as the only storage medium. I don't know if the USB port can be used as a communication port or not. I would assume it could be, would just need the proper support in the FPGA core. The main function of the MCC-216 is to be able to play games from the old arcade machines and home computers, not necessarily for general computing or experimenting. That's where it falls flat with little external peripheral support. A board that would better support general computer emulation would be nice, and there may be a market for such if it's not too closely CoCo targeted.

A good review of the MCC-216 is located at http://www.commodorefree.com/vol4.htm. You want issue 46. Only the PDF file has pictures. Technical specs are here: http://www.mcc-home.com/4.html. It does have a GPIO interface, so a serial port could be added. I can only see on 10 pin header on the only shot of the standard board, and there is a JTAG interface as well. Could be both use those 10 pins, may be another header on the other side of the board. The development version appears to be a different board.