[Coco] MCC-216

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 2, 2013, at 8:41 AM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

> It seems to me, that what you are wanting... is another Coco. Cloud 9 sells them.

I have my old CoCo 3 which I hope still works, and a "never used, other than Cloud-9 upgrading it" CoCo 3 still in box. But, capacitors, etc. are likely to die on them, and soon it's all gone.

So yes, another CoCo. One that is modern, new electronics that might last another decade. Not some 25 year old machine that may not even power up the next time I boot it.

Emulation is fine, but compare playing TRON on MAME on a PC versus using an arcade controller and there's no comparison. So much still needs to be preserved and today, sadly, I couldn't even preserve my own stuff. I have not had a way to read a 5 1/4" disk drive in ages. But if I had some new hybrid machine that I could plug my FD1773 into and start sucking disks over to a virtual drive on an SD card, I'd be in business. And I imagine many others wanting to preserve their stuff would be, too.

> I feel the whole idea of creating a new Coco is not to exactly emulate the Coco we have.. I have several... why emulate them if not to make them better? But the idea is to take the Coco to new heights and expand the Coco to what it could have been had Tandy continued to

Nothing wrong with making them better. That would be fantastic. The key is being able to have the real hardware. We don't need a real Speech/Sound Pak if we can emulate and get the same thing. But you can't emulate a CoCo joystick with a mouse and get the same effect. You can't, for fun, plug up a DS69 to show what retro digitizing was in an emulator... Typing on a PC or Mac keyboard is never going to feel right trying to play Sea Dragon, expecting the CoCo 1 arrow keys to be where they were.

> work in many ways, even from custom made hardware interfaces. The serial protocol was for the Coco's benefit.. Drivewire itself is not limited to this. It will accept data in most any way you want to send it, just give it a port to connect to.

I picked up a copy and bought the cable at the first CoCoFEST! it was presented at. It's a good thing, but I never got around to using it. I might, one day, by having a tiny Pi or Arduino acting as a server, since that would be "turn on and go" rather than having to set it all up with a PC that also has to be on. But yes, a great thing.

> The next to go is the monitors. Roy's adapter has helped with this problem. But we need a cheaper solution to this. A "new" Coco would solve this with compatibility with modern monitors.

I have one of those too :-)  So much stuff we have hooked up is gone (SCSI, IDE) which is what intrigues my about FPGA... HDMI? DVI? Sure, whatever the platform supports. 

> The joystick/mouse for the Coco was a joke to say the least. It was inadequate from the beginning. The resolution was less than the screen it operated on. The advent of the Coco 3 made it worse when they didn't address this problem. It was one of the biggest complaints when the Coco3 came out.

And back then, "we" power users moved on to OS-9 and didn't want to even touch a silly cartridge or disk basic. But today, it's really a fun step back to get to that green screen and experience all the stuff that was left behind when we went to text terminal screens and multitasking. Including the original CoCo analog joysticks, which back then, everyone wanted a digital ATari stick adapter. And today? It's back to an analog world. I can't think of anything I'd rather play Double Back on than an original CoCo joystick :)

> I too would like as much "backward compatibility" as possible but sacrifices have to be made just as we did with the Coco 3 that would not run all Coco 1/2 software. Yes, every circuit in the Coco could be hardware emulated (theoretically) and a Coco could be made. But I, for one, am not willing to pay the price that would entail to create such a monster and I feel most are of the same opinion.

FPGA can do both. That's what got me so interested a few years ago when I saw one running at the Fest. It seemed to be the best of both worlds -- emulated software, but on an actual plug-and-go piece of hardware. Seems everyone else has that but the TRS-80 guys at this point.

> This of course is just my opinion and subject to change as soon as someone releases something new... :-)
> Bill P

Sounds like you are right there with me.

		-- A