[Coco] Cloud-9 Product Comments Wanted

[James Dessart]

I'm gonna throw in my two cents... The reason my family bought our
original CoCo was because it was easy to use, and you got pretty much
everything you needed in the box. We got a couple of joysticks, and
eventually a floppy drive, but everything fit together nicely, and it just
worked.

What I would like to see is a pak that includes a drive already, CF or
whatever, has a real-time clock, a serial port for PC communication, and
NitrOS-9 pre-installed. A pass-through port allows you to plug in your
floppy drive controller, or speech and sound pak, or whatever.

Ideally this should cost $50. Do I think that's an unreasonable
expectation? Maybe. But the drive doesn't need to be big, the serial port
doesn't need to be fast, and the clock doesn't need to be incredibly
accurate. As I see it, a $10 AVR chip can handle all of that, and that's
the retail price of it. I have no idea how much the board manufacturing
and such cost, but with a 64 MB CF card costing $16 US, that's $26 for the
basic core. At $50, from what I can tell, there's quite a bit of margin
for other parts of the pak, like a basic EPROM and socket, along with a
clock crystal and battery.

Maybe $50 we be cutting it a bit close, who knows, maybe $75, but that's
the kind of price range I'm looking at for those features.

Do I want flashable ROM? No, not really. It's a cool feature, but I don't
see myself ever using it more than a couple of times.

James