[Coco] The next coco3.....wish list

[Mark McDougall]

On 5/10/2014 9:44 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> Coco3fpga barely fits on the DE1, which I believe has 20,000.

Not quite true. The constraint on the DE1 with the Coco3FPGA project is the 
on-chip memory, not the logic. Last build I did it was only 66% logic.

Of course the 2C5 is way too small in terms of memory, and also too small 
logic-wise, which I mentioned a few weeks ago but that comment appears to 
have been ignored as people have continued to entertain the idea of the 2C5 
dev board... oh well.

> Of course none of the speculation or "wish list" discussion actually
> matters, because only Gary Becker with his coco3fpga has done the work and
> created anything.

Again, not quite true. I finished a Coco1/2 FPGA implementation a few years 
ago, with hard drive (HDBDOS) emulation via CF. There's a DE1 port of it, 
but since the SD card implementation on it is read-only atm, it's of little 
use to anyone but myself.

> Its easy to write about what "they" should do or how "somebody" could make
> this or that, but it seems very hard for the list to understand that there
> is no "they".  " someone" is you and me.  Either make it, or help someone
> make it, or forget about ever seeing it happen.

IMHO what is really holding the 'Coco3FPGA' back is a lack of a 
cycle-accurate 6809/6309 core. If one ever surfaced, then it (Coco3FPGA/DE1) 
would tick a lot of boxes for a lot of people. But it's a tall ask; CPU 
cores - especially something like the 6809 - aren't exactly trivial.

Regards,

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