[Coco] CC-Five (was Re: Pseudo CoCo4???)

[farna at att.net]

Mark's idea has merit, but would it get any more use than using a PC platform as the "generic platform" and emulation as the "personality board" with all the I/O? With the different I/O devices you'd have to have some sort of control panel to make it all work, which could be partially seamless, but would likely need some outside hardware/software control. 

If the emulator itself is integrated with the OS, or the OS made subservient to the emulator, the creation would have the feel of a new machine, and could be repackaged to complete the illusion. That's what I was thinking when I suggested using something like a mini ITX board or some other embedded controller board. It could be packaged in something like a dual or quad 5.25" drive case along with a single floppy drive. 

The biggest problem would be reading old CoCo disks. I believe most 1.2mb drives will read them, but not write a disk readable on a true 360K drive. But there's always Drivewire and if necessary the serial port for transfers. But for how long would this be a problem? There's certainly nothing wrong with copying old software to different media and sharing it with someone who has an original copy, if you're leery of sharing the old software. 

How much of a project is it to reprogram a parallel port to at least read a cartridge? Seems to me that should be reasonably easy to do. Might not be under Windows because of no direct access to the hardware, but DOS or Linux should be able to do it.

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 -------------- Original message ----------------------
(Mark McDougall)
I like the idea of having a Coco 'personality' board, but I'd go 1 step
further. It'd be a cross between the Nanoboard and the C-One. That is,
design a generic platform - perhaps in a standard form-factor (PC) -
with the 'essentials' such as SDRAM, SRAM, flash, video (VGA+composite),
audio (decent stereo audio DAC) + amplifiers, PS/2 connector(s),
SD/MMC/CF/IDE interfaces, USB host chip for starters.