[Coco] "Historic" CD-i development systems...

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/17/05 6:16:30 AM Eastern Standard Time,  
jamesjones01 at mchsi.com writes:

>The  CD-i player was way underpowered. The 68070 was a Signetics (which I  
>think Philips bought) 68000 clone that had one less ALU, so that it  was 
>_slower than the 68000_...and there were much better 680x0  processors 
>around then


Nice to see James Jones is still around the List -- hi!
As some of you know, the 68070 was also the CPU used in the MM/1  
(Multi-Media One) computer, one of the many "Coco4" candidates.  It came as  a 
screw-it-together kit, bundled with Microware's OS/K (68000), including the C  compiler, 
which was well beyond K&R but not quite ANSI.  You can read  more about it on 
my Web site 
 
_http://members.aol.com/knudsenmj/myhomepage/index.html_ 
(http://members.aol.com/knudsenmj/myhomepage/index.html) 
 
At the time, compared to the Coco environment, the MM/1 seemed faster than  
lightning.  And since its utilities like DIR and DSAVE were much improved  over 
the 6809 versions, it was much better to work in.  Clock speed was  around 15 
MHz (maybe 14.3x, to match the TV scan rate?)
 
But later, compared with my Linux box -- 133 MHz P1 and 64M RAM -- the MM/1  
seems as slow as a Coco.
 
One or two entrepreneurs in the Coco world did market an upgrade from the  
underpowered 68070 -- it used a 68306 or something like that.  You replaced  the 
little CPU card with their card, and hopefully ran faster.  I never got  the 
upgrade.
--Mike K.