[Coco] Multi-user CoCo BBS via telnet [WAS - Re: Are there any CoCo BBS's out there?]

[Joel Ewy]

mike delyea wrote:
> To my mind you gotta use a real coco.  I think doing otherwise would violate
> the spirit of this community.
>
>   
Of course, everybody's got their own take on this.  Here's mine.  I find
software emulators useful and interesting for some purposes, but they
really provide a different experience for me than (some kind of) real
hardware.  Mainly, the idea of waiting through interminable BIOS
Power-On Self-Tests and host OS boots detracts a lot (for me) from the
CoCo experience of instant access at the touch of the power switch. 
Now, if the thing was being used for a BBS, which would presumably be
running most of the time like a server, it might not be so bad.

But for me, the idea of a CoCo implemented in an FPGA is just cool.  It
seems more "real" to me than does a software emulator.  One could, in
theory, implement just a 6x09 processor in an FPGA, run it at e.g.
16MHz, and interface it to a real CoCo 3's 6809 socket, thereby having a
fancy CPU upgrade (limited of course to 2MHz data transfers by the
external bus).  How is this different from replacing the 6809 with a
6309, or building a '4MHz' clock board like Sockmaster's?

One could also, in principle, replace or augment the GIME with some kind
of custom chip.  The >512K RAM upgrades already do augment the
functionality of the GIME chip.  If we can augment or replace the CPU
and still call it a CoCo, why shouldn't we augment or replace the GIME
and still call it a real CoCo, assuming that it is in some sense
recognizable as a descendant of the GIME's design and functionality? 
And if we can replace both of those things, plus other functions, with
an FPGA, presuming that the result is no more incompatible with the CoCo
3 than the CoCo 3 was with previous versions of the CoCo, I don't see
that we've violated the spirit of CoCo in so doing.

And part of the spirit of the CoCo community is a do-it-yourself ethic
and homegrown improvements to a system that, just out of the box, had
most of its tremendous potential unfulfilled.  CoCo FPGA projects like
Mark McDougall's or Gary Becker's, because they have pledged to make
them open systems for all of us to contribute to, are in my opinion very
much in accord with the spirit of the CoCo community.

But certainly, for the BBS project, it might be feasible to begin with a
'real' CoCo 3, and then migrate to an FPGA CoCo for better performance
later with a minimum of hardware waste.  How much is Cloud 9 charging
for a new CoCo 3?  It's pretty affordable.  Start with one serial port
and one modem.  Add a second serial port and a SitePlayer Telnet, or
some similar thing for Internet access.  See how well a stock CoCo 3 can
handle a couple users.  If it gets enough use to make it worthwhile,
migrate to an FPGA system.  It's a thought anyway.

JCE
> On 8/3/07, Rod Barnhart <rod.barnhart at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On 8/3/07, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
>>     
>>> Of course an FPGA CoCo running at 16MHz could have a very large number
>>> of UARTs or ACIAs implemented in its logic, and could support several
>>> users quite comfortably.  There your limiting factor could be available
>>> physical I/O lines (maybe not, I don't know how many of those are free
>>> for use on the development systems) and phone lines, modems, or RS-232
>>> <-> Ethernet adapters.  But I think one could put together a pretty
>>> spiffy NitrOS-9 BBS with an FPGA CoCo.
>>>
>>> JCE
>>>       
>> Now I have an interesting dilemma. I'm not going to give up my only
>> CoCo3 for this project beyond getting it to actually work. After that,
>> I'll have to purchase additional hardware to dedicate to the project.
>> Should I go with real CoCo hardware, or with an FPGA CoCo? Learning
>> curve will be about the same for either, as I have no experience
>> designing serial cards for the CoCo (but am encouraged by others who
>> have done so in the past), nor with working with FPGA's. The cost of
>> real hardware might be a little higher, but which way has the bigger
>> coolness factor?
>>
>> BTW, thanks to Richard Ivey for inspiring the idea of this project by
>> asking about dialup coco BBSes. Sorry the conversation was sorta
>> highjacked from there ;)
>>
>>
>> --
>> Rod Barnhart aka Wintermute (http://www.nitemarecafe.com)
>>
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>>
>>     
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