[Coco] 6809 computer boards (was French Translation Compensation)

[jdaggett at gate.net]

On 20 Nov 2007 at 23:59, Joel Ewy wrote:

> True enough.  At this point, you can get a CoCo 3 from Cloud 9 for
> $35? $40?  This is a great deal.  You can also get a Dragon from
> California Digital for about the same price.  But for about three
> times the price you can get an FPGA development kit, download Gary
> Becker's code, and have a CoCo 3 SOC which runs at about 10x the speed
> of the CoCo 3, it will work with a VGA monitor, and you don't even
> need to get a disk controller for it.

======================

Joel

You can only just download the code and burn it into a FPGA "if and only if" you are using 
the same development board. It may or may not be just that easy. 

WIth HDL language and FPGAs,  the source code can be tailored to a specific vendor and 
specific FPGA. SO far with a casual look,  Gary's code is pretty much not vendor specific. I 
would imagine that the whole SoC can be done on a 300K equivalent FPGA or larger. 

If the HDL code is writ'ten "somewhat portable" then recompiling and a change to the *.ucf 
file, which governs which pinouts of the FPGA are used and for what, would need changing. 

Yes all  this is a step in the right direction. Right now any Coco3 in a SoC is still 
developmental. Agreed that a developemnt board can be purchased in the range of $150. 
Agreed that it will run faster. Also I caution that when you step up the processor speed so 
will the speed of the applications. This could be a problem with programs that derive critical 
timings to the serial port or to older peripherals from a 0.89/1.79 MHz clock. 

james