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

[Barry Nelson]

 My thoughts/ramblings.

 It is fairly easy to implement a SD/MMC interface using SPI if emulating a floppy controller is not required. If floppy emulation is desired then it becomes more complex, however floppy emulation is necessary to run many pieces of software since they access the floppy controller directly. A real time clock is one thing I miss on my CoCo SDC that I had on my original Burke & Burke HD controller. An ethernet interface could be implemented fairly easily in a limited fashion using a serial to wifi chip to allow telnet, or implement the DriveWire protocol on an Arduino and use that to interface to wifi or ethernet. I think that cramming to much functionality into one device could make it too expensive though. The ethernet interface could be a separate device. I wish the CoCo SDC included a realtime clock however. I think a parallel port would be of limited use at best, a second serial interface would be much more useful, though still of limited value.