[Coco] The evolution of the Coco..

[Steve Bjork]

Nick, As for the Idea, fine it's your idea.  (Though it's the same idea 
that Allen and I have been talking about for the past few years.)

The part of your Idea of reprogramming the BIOS, I have a few problems with...

1) The BIOS ROMS are small on most motherboards and could not hold the 
extra code for emulator, let alone the drivers for printers and other devices.

2) Only one model of motherboard could be use.  I'm assuming your are not 
going to rewrite the BIOS for every motherboard Chip Set out there.  What 
happen when the version 2 of the motherboard comes or they some making 
it?  The life span of a motherboard is less than a year these days.

3) Who are you going to get to reverse-engineer the BIOS?  The the biggest 
question of all!

No Nick, this is too much work just to have a CoCo4 start running instantly.

So the my design of a PC with Cloud-9's Compact Flash IDE interface will 
take a few seconds to boot, it's still less time it takes for the Monitor 
to warm up.

Your Comment about boot from a flash IDE...

This would open the door to a myriad of other emulations such as a 
Commodore's and Atari's. Just insert the flash ram personality module!

Unfortunately, now it starts to lose it's identity as being uniquely CoCo 
and more of a generic emulation platform. Maybe I'm being too CoCo religious.

Why worry about this? After all, this is a grass root system that no one is 
going to make any money off.

Let us keep it simple and put the work into a better and expanded emulator.

As for the operating system to use, my vote goes to windows XP Pro.  It's 
rock solid OS. I have not had a crash in over two years. (I can't say the 
same about my Linux systems.) Best of all, every new hardware product these 
days has drivers for Window XP.  Yes, I know, I would have to use a hard 
drive with XP.  But is that truly a problem?

As for rebooting, you reboot the CoCo run under the emulator, not the PC.


I know I'm going to a lots of email on that because many of you don't like 
Microsoft, but ...

Even Steve Jobs had to "get over it" and make his Apple iPod work with 
windows to boost market share.

And you are running Microsoft Basic in your CoCo.

Steve