[Coco] Utility of large MPI (was: Re: ROM Cart registers)

[Camillus]

Why not integrate the diskcontrollers ( floppy, ide, etc, etc ) straight into the coco design, so that the range FF40-FF5F can be used solely for cartridge I/O. There has to be a chunk of 16 addresses somewhere in the coco's memory map that can be decoded for the controllers?

just my $0.02 

cb 

Sent from Mailbird [http://www.getmailbird.com/?utm_source=Mailbird&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sent-from-mailbird]
On 2/2/2016 12:21:24 PM, RETRO Innovations <go4retro at go4retro.com> wrote:
My comment was more around the utility of such a device in the context
of existing HW (no driver changes/rewriting). The only value the MPI
provides is to select among existing devices that reside in $ff4x, which
is mainly:

FF40:FF4F



FD-502 (FDC)



Floppy Drive Controller (all?)

FF40:FF5F



Color Burner



Dennis Kitsz' Color Burner


Otherwise, a Y cable would be just as useful (a 4 tap cable, or 8 tap)
and be significantly cheaper. Maybe a Y cable with some buffer/driver
ICs to beef up the address/data/control line integrity.

I'm just thinking what is needed is a next generation MPI, with possibly
an MPI-emulator mode, where:

* Each port is truly isolated. If you have selected slot #3, then
slot #3 (and only slot #3) is connected to the Coco. Each cart
would be completely isolated from any other cart.
* In MPI-emulate mode, only CTS, CART, and SCS would be isolated.

Of course, in this case, any software that is not MPI aware would need
to be modified (I would assume HDB-DOS is top of the list) so it would
select the correct slot before executing any code.

It's not terribly hard to modify the MPI design to support full
isolation (essentially, the quickest option would be to put 3 state
buffers on some activity lines like E and Q, and put a buffer on DATA.
BUt, with buffers on each individual data line on each individual slot,
You'd need to mux all of the data ports on a read cycle (since you'd
have no idea which slot is driving the DATA bus). That adds a lot of
complexity.

At that point, it's probably cheaper/better to simply make a super IO
cart, like used to be on PCs.

* Glenside IDE
* CocoSDC
* ROM
* serial
* RTC
* centronics parallel?
* not sure what else (sound generator?)

Of the above, IDE, serial, parallel, rtc, and flash are easy, looks like
you have FDD figured out, and not sure what else folks would need. With
an MPI, you'd still have options for Speech, SC-90, special purpose
existing carts, etc. paks.

Just thinking out loud.

Jim



--
Coco mailing list
Coco at maltedmedia.com
https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco