[Coco] (no subject)

[farna at amc-mag.com]

Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 07:27:01 -0500
From: Ron Klein <ron at kdomain.org>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] Looks like someone has already done some legwork
        to get a Pi to boot as a Coco
Message-ID:
        <CANgnoUWcuBDCOjqW8O_pHBVFLaw=_8Dav83vPkPrM8jqEnYGng at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Hi John,

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 I run Coco emulation on.  I do use RetroPie and it
works well for classic game system and arcade game emulation.  It does run
XRoar and you can automatically boot into a particular system.  Some were
asking how fast this process is -- all relative and nothing is
instantaneous.

While I still prefer a real Coco, this method of emulation is nice and
fairly inexpensive.  At it's highest level, you can run a Coco 3 with 4MB
of RAM, have tons of storage, virtual MPI support with Orchestra 90
capabilities, too.  HDMI is nice, though there are ways to connect to VGA
or even composite video.  Digital audio through the HDMI port or analog
audio through the composite output jack.  You can also get a 9 pin serial
dongle which can be attached to the GPIO header if you don't want to use up
a USB port for serial connections.

Depending on how many folks are interested, perhaps we can create a Coco
emulation distribution for the Raspberry Pi which includes Drivewire and
other utilities (like toolshed and various compilers) so it can be a
development / debug platform of sorts.  That's how I use mine.  An SD card
image could be made of a pre-configured set up (with the exception of the
licensed ROMs).  Instructions would be provided on where to copy those ROM
files.

-Ron

===============================================

Ron, if you made an SD card image of a full blown CoCo system (4MB, Orch
90, MPI, Drivewire and all... ready for a serial dongle) I'm sure several
would be interested in it. Would be nice if it booted up that way from the
start with no added input -- just turn it on and it boots to a CoCo3
screen. I suppose you could use an escape key to get into native Linux if
necessary/desired for individual tweaks. Just take everything you don't
need for emulation out of Linux. I'd be interested... and if you specify
it's for a RPi3 only, that's just fine.