[Coco] CocoFLASH Production

[Barry Nelson]

The CoCo SDC has 8 independent 16k banks for a total flash rom storage of 128k. It can only store and run up to 8 cartridges of the sizes 2k, 4k, 8k, and 16k.

It also emulates a floppy controller.

 

The CoCo Flash does not emulate a floppy controller, but can store and run a DriveWire rom. It has 8192k or 8MB total of flash rom storage, or 64 times the flash rom storage of the CoCo SDC, and can store a maximum of 2048 roms if they are all 4k in size. It can store and run cartridge sizes of 2k (uses 4k of storage), 4k, 8k, 16k, 32k, and banked cartridges of 64k, 128k, and larger. It also functions as an Orchestra 90 audio cartridge. In practical terms, you can program this one cartridge to mimic the behavior of every game cartridge every released for the CoCo, and have it be an Orchestra 90 cartridge including the rom portion and a DriveWire cartridge and still have space left over. Also, when it runs these cartridge images, it runs an exact image of the original game, no patches are required such as would be if you tried to load some of the games from disk. Additionally I have utilities that allow you to load single BIN files from a rom bank, allowing many disk based games to be loaded as well. It is designed for anyone who wants to:

 

1)      Develop games or DOS roms and test them, including banked roms larger than 32k, which are NOT supported on most emulators at this time.

2)      Use any existing rom images, games or DOS roms, without hacking them to load into ram from floppy disk.

 

I currently have 36 different games and DOS images loaded into my prototype, with a menu which allows me to select which one I want to run.

These two devices serve different purposes and I am glad to own both. For someone who want to play Color Computer game cartridges unpatched this cartridge is a great addition to your CoCo equipment.

 

Because I am at work I cannot check this link but this should be a demo showing the capabilities of this cartridge. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McyJjQ6eAE0

 

>        From Scott Wendt malfunct at msn.com

 

>        I haven't used it but it seems like it is similar only to the flash memory banks on the SDC and not the floppy emulator portion.

 

>        >     From: Coco <coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com> on behalf of Brad Dillon <eebuckeye at hotmail.com>

>        >     Sent: Tuesday, November 8, 2016 6:19:57 AM

>        >     To: coco at maltedmedia.com

>        >     Subject: Re: [Coco] CocoFLASH Production

 

>        >     I apologize for the stupid question but how similar is this to the SDC?  Both store images such as games, etc...?