[Coco] Compaq Internet Appliance (IA-1) CoCo emulation

Roger Taylor operator at coco3.com
Sat Nov 17 15:13:23 EST 2007


Thanks to a guy named Joe among us, I am able to boot up my little 
IA-1 from a 2-gig CF card containing MS-DOS and all of the Keil 
emulators with software.

Let me say, that it was a sight to see and it put a grin on my face, 
although there are keyboard issues at this time that I'm sorting 
out.  Other than that, the 233mhz PC is just like any other compact 
computer except that under MS-DOS you're limited without all the 
hardware drivers.  It has 4 USB ports, audio out (not working from 
the emulator, and a phone modem jack.

I've gone through a lot of virtual disks having fun seeing a pretend 
CoCo doing a great job.  I haven't tried NitrOS-9 from the .vhd we've 
been discussing (the setup I have with VCC).

Basically what this IA-1 is doing is eliminating the MPI, ROM Paks, 
controllers, floppy drives and disks, tapes, etc. and it's all 
contained on the CF card.  No moving parts at all.  I don't even 
think there's a fan in the case.

I'll do some more hacking around and then post some pictures, with 
credit to Joe for helping out and being there by e-mail during the project.

The entire CoCo system is on the CF and can be .img'ed to where 
somebody else can DD it from Linux onto their on CF without having to 
partition or format, as far as I know.  This is what I did, and it worked.






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