[Coco] CoCo-X is not dead

[Mark McDougall]

On 9/05/2013 10:19 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:

> Yes, the C-64 DTV by Jeri Ellsworth in essentially a slightly enhanced C-64
> on a chip, and the Atari Flashback 2/2+ by Legacy Engineering is an Atari
> 2600 on a chip. 

I'm going to have to go with Bill on this one.

Firstly, there's simply no way this scale of development can be done for
anywhere near $150K. You'd be hard-pressed to do it for that price - in a
case - even if you stole the existing C64 FPGA IP, which I'm assuming is
not on the cards here?!?  I notice it's not due until Oct 2014, so he's
planning on funding an electronics design engineer, an FPGA engineer, an
industrial designer and pay for tooling/manufacturing for the next 18
months with $150K??? Simply laughable.

There's a reason there is only 1 backer after 14 days. I'd be surprised if
he gets 2 before it's done. He also gets to keep the funds even if it
doesn't meet the goals, which IMHO has already killed it in the water.

Aside from the C-One, MMC, C64DTV & Flashback, there are other commercial
single-chip developments of various scales. There are single-chip NES (aka
NOAC), SNES and Sega Genesis designs sold in various guises (interested
parties should check out the RetroN4/5 and its clones). There was the
One-Chip MSX (aka OCM) that was quite successful; it perhaps being the
closest to a C-One/Coco-X type project. And there is the Turbo Chameleon
64, a plug-in cartridge for the C64 in active development that can also
serve as anything from n Action Replay cartridge or a VGA converter on the
C64 to completely stand-alone C64 and Amiga emulations.

Another project to keep your eye on is the 'Replay' from FPGAARCADE. It's
in initial production now and could probably be best described as an
updated C-One; it also emulates the Amiga and several other platforms, and
is designed to fit in an ITX case. There's no question that it could
emulate a Coco, though I'm not sure what I/O options would be available to
facilitate cart connectors.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"