[Coco] CoCo emulation on a Compaq Internet Appliance?

[Roger Taylor]

While driving through town today a local church was having a huge 
multi-family rummage sale.  I whipped in to comb the place for 
gadgets and I came across this wierd little compact device that 
appeared to be a terminal.  Someone had it at the bottom of a big box 
full of Tandy 1000 stuff.  I passed up the Tandy computer, monitor, 
and stuff, and was mesmerized by the small size of the Compaq "thingy".

It has a flat panel screen that folds upward, a remote keyboard, 4 
USB ports, 2 phone jacks, sound out jack, and a Compact Flash 
slot.  Ah ha!  Potential, I said.  So me and the kids rounded up an 
armload of crap, took it to their little table with a tarp over it, 
and the lady said.... how about $5 for all that.  I put on a fake 
poker face, and said... hmmm, and I took a look at the junk we 
gathered up which was probably 4 items, and I said.... "ok".  :)

So I get home, Google up "Compaq CE-1000" and "Compaq Internet 
Appliance" and soon came across a few hack sites for the thing.  It 
turns out, a guy has put LINUX on his.  Using a 16MB Compact Flash 
image of the bootable copy of Linux, and changing a few BIOS 
parameters (it normally runs a small version of Windows and MSN 
Explorer/Companion, etc.), he walks you through how he boots into 
Linux and apparently uses or is trying to use his USB-to-Ethernet 
device to connect to the net.

What I want to do is use a larger CF card with some kind of bootable 
CoCo emulator on it and try to turn this thing into a ... CoCo 4 
?  :)  Ok, bad choice of words, as i don't want to fire THAT topic up 
again, but perhaps this thing has enough power (266mz) and hardware 
to support a fully-housed version of an emulated CoCo.  With the 
internal Flash and CF capabilities as well as 4 USB ports, I think 
something neat can be done here.

There's currently one on Ebay as well if anyone wants to go parallel 
with me on this project and see what happens.  I'm thrilled that it 
powered up with a nice color display and ofcourse Microsoft takes 
over very quickly and is a reminder that it's just a computer and it 
can run an operating system and normal software.

Here's a few links to wet the appetite.


http://cgi.ebay.com/Compaq-iPAQ-Home-Internet-Appliance-IA-1-178358-001_W0QQitemZ300160514342QQihZ020QQcategoryZ140072QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
(see the large photos at the bottom of the page)

http://realprogrammers.com/hack/IA-1/img/original/x_session.jpg

http://www.koopjesnet.be/compaq_series_ce1000_178358-001_ipaq_home_internet_zd20049964.html