[Coco] Multi-Pak Interface question.

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Rick Taylor wrote:
> Has anyone ever made Multi-Pak clones? 

I believe there are a couple of designs that I have seen, after all it's 
not really rocket science, really just a buffered bus expander with some 
selection & arbitration logic really.

> Would it be legal to do so?

I'm not a lawyer so all IMHO :)

Literal hardware clones, probably, but wether it would be a problem 
would depend on wether Radio Shack where interested in persuing it, 
considdering that the Dragon 32/64 where a virtual clones of the CoCo, 
I'd say probably not. Also considdering the age of the hardware in 
question it would probably not be worth it.

Logical clones using the same registers at the same IO locations and 
custom designed hardware using say LS logic or a CPLD should be fine.

As an example look at all the IBM PC clones there where, which where 
functionally identical, and IBM couldn't do anything about them, unless 
as was the case with some of them, they ripped off the IBM bios, rather 
than coding their own.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.