[Coco] Re: CoCo video? (CoCo4)

[farna at att.net]

Making an FPGA enhanced CoCo does sound feasible, but I have to ask why? That's a lot of work for a product that will end up costing more than most would want to pay. I understand the desire for a high performance CoCo, but with the cost of PC hardware and fast emulators, the "CoCo4" is already there. A decent Pentium 3 processor will run an emulator much faster than a CoCo. So why not tweak an emulator to extend the CoCo capabilities? That should be doable while still maintaining compatibility. It would be easy enough in NitrOS-9. DECB could always have the option of running a standard emulator. Make the thing self booting with one of the free DOS systems, and run from something like a VIA mini computer board, package in a small case with either a small laptop HD or a flash card to boot from, and there you have it! 

I'd like to see DECB patched to something like the old 512K BASIC capabilities, and most of the ADOS enhancements added. A configuration utility similar to a BIOS editing screen on the PC so that configuration of drives (at least) could be changed easily, and as often as desired, would be nice. Support for larger disk drives would be a necessity also (and that might be a problem -- but maybe not if an enhanced and standard emulator were with each machine...) Once all that was worked out and running nicely, it could then be programmed into an FPGA and a new board made if that's a real desire. At least a standard for the extended capabilities would be worked out. 

The only thing missing is an easy way to interface to the outside world. There's your hardware project: an external interface board that plugs into a PCI slot. I always liked being able to easily use the CoCo joystick ports (and even the cassette port) for easy I/O. Maybe even emulate the CoCo cartridge port on the same card! Some easy to program data I/O ports and a half dozen relays on a card would be realy nice. The CoCo's strong point has always been experimentation and easy programming -- an I/O card and the standard DECB with extended memory capabilities (long BASIC programs -- and might want to extend variables to more than two character names) would really open things up. 

--
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Independent 
Magazine" (AIM)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AIM.html
(free download available!)

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 14:36:04 EST
From: KnudsenMJ at aol.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] Re: [Color Computer] Re: CoCo video?

 
In a message dated 3/3/06 2:08:53 PM Eastern Standard Time,  jdag
gett at gate.net writes:

>How  Fast for the 6809?



Well, let's see.  Some tinkerers managed to run a real 6309 up to 4  MHz.
 
7 years ago at Bell Labs we were designing ASICs that ran at 50 MHz, and  
sections of some of them ran at 400.  ISTR the Xilinx FPGAs were running  around 
10 or 20 MHz.
 
By now, you could probably build a 6809 ASIC that would almost output the  
results before you fed in the data ;-)  But RAM could be an issue -- though  
fast static 64K or even 512K RAM might be feasible, too.  Maybe even put  64K 
right on the chip -- in fact, I think we had ASICs with more than that back  
then 
in my project.
 
Any of this should be fast enough to enrich your fantasy life ;-)   --Mike K.