[Coco] CoCo emulation on a Compaq Internet Appliance?

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:50 AM 10/22/2007, you wrote:
>Just bought the one on Ebay. didn't get as nice a deal as you did 
>but hey. From what I've been reading its not CE but I could be 
>wrong, when I get it I'll figure it out. There IS an older verison 
>of VCC called POCO that was Windows CE but I haven't worked on it in 
>a while. If it is CE guess whats getting pulled out or "retirement". 
>Anyway when toys and time arrive I'll post something.
>Frankly though with only 266Mhz to play with I'm thinking Keil's 
>emulator would probably do a better job than VCC assuming it can 
>boot dos. On the other hand an AMD 266 would be a socket 7 CPU with 
>a 4X multiplyer. Might be upgradable If not to the full 100Mhz FSB 
>at least an 83 Mhz overclock. Or perhaps a higher Multiplyer if the 
>board really won't go higher that 66. Never seen one yet though. 
>Again I'll need to muck around and let you know.



Great.  It really looks like the best candidate for an emulator 
machine.  If everything can be put on a CompactFlash card that the 
system can boot from, with enough work I see no reason why this can't 
be turned into a fake CoCo, TRS-80 Model 1, etc.  That is, a separate 
CF card could also be used for each vintage computer emulated, making 
it so darn easy to run that it almost seems too good to be true.

I've never tried to boot into MS-DOS/DOS from any of my laptops that 
have a CF port or memory stick slot.  I guess all we need is for the 
CF card to work on the Compaq appliance and then stuff it with all 
the CoCo "stuff" possible that the emulator can read.

I would absolutely crap a gold brick if I can get this thing to read 
a USB floppy drive (from Keil's or JV's emulator) since I have at 
least half of my CoCo stuff on 3.5's written from a real CoCo.  With 
the BIOS reporting it can boot from Floppy A: or Hard Drive C:, and 
knowing that there is NO floppy drive on the unit, it kinda sounds 
obvious that it supports USB floppy drives BEFORE Windows takes over.