[Coco] CoCo 4 (or 5) perspectives: close hardware emulation?

[Andrew]

Joel,

You wrote:

The problem with Linux is that it takes a little while to boot in a
live-cd-type situation where it has to do a lot of hardware detection
and autoconfiguring.  Not a long time, but it ain't nuthin' like
powerin' on that CoCo, man.  But once it gets up and running it's hard
to beat for stability, and it can be almost completely configured
away.   FreeDOS would boot in seconds on a modern PC, but wouldn't have
nearly the hardware support that a modern Linux kernel does.  No USB,
poor networking.  DOS didn't compare well with the CoCo back in the day
(at least in terms of price/performance), the only real benefit you'd
get from it now is the ability to take advantage of the speed of the
underlying hardware.  I guess it also would put up little resistance
against an emulator program that wanted to directly manipulate the
hardware, but why reinvent that particular wheel?

---

Just a couple of cents here, but why not simply boot directly into the 
emulator instead of DOS or Linux? In effect, the emulator becomes the 
operating system. I guess I am thinking something like a hybrid between 
one of the emulators and FreeDOS, so you gain all the hardware interface 
functionality from FreeDOS for the emulator, but you don't have to have 
all the extra DOS stuff. If done right, I imagine it could look, feel, 
and work almost identical to DECB - and if the emulation is kept tight 
(and you had the ROM images or something similar), OS-9 and NitrOS9 
should still work (or be tweaked to work).

There would still be a startup delay, but I don't think that is a real 
deal-breaker, otherwise no one would use any computer anywhere. The 
issue of network and USB hardware would still be there, but plenty of 
open-source code is out there for getting most of the basic stuff going.

Does this sound like a good (or at least interesting) approach, or am I 
being daft here...?

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona