[Coco] Why do a next Gen CoCo? was Any news on the so called CoCo4 or NextCoCo

[jdaggett at gate.net]

On 19 Nov 2010 at 13:23, Frank Pittel wrote:

> 
> The point I was trying to make is that unless a person (realistically a group of
> people) pick up the ball and start doing the work of writing software, designing
> hardware, etc the "coco4" is just a pipe dream. In the case of the coco3fpga there
> is work being done by a group(?) led by Gary (or is it Gary by himself?). I don't
> know that anyone is actually working on writing an emulator or extending one of
> the existing emulators. I've read talk about it being easy to extend mess but I
> don't know that anyone has done.

Frank 

You hit the nail on the head.

I am finishing up one project and should be close enough by Christmas to start on a FPGA 
hardware design that I have invisioned. I am talking about PCBs and physical hardware. 
Right now there is enough HDL code to generate a bare minimum system. I have a slight 
differnet apporach to Gary on a GIME chip. First off I have written mine in VHDL and not 
Verilog. Hardware wise I do not care to carry the COCO ROMs inside the FPGA as Block 
ROMS. If you want to edit and reassemble the RSBASIC code, you then have to regenerate 
the bit pattern for the FPGA. I think that asks to much of an end user. 

Instead I invision usign a SPI ROM or even a small boot ROM and possibly the FTDI 
VenculumII chip and a USB flash drive to boot SECB and put it in SRAM.  There use to be a 
chip that was DOS on A chip that allowed a MPU like a 6809 to access FAT12/FAT16 
formatted drives. The VInculum willdo FAT16 and I think FAT32 with 8.3 format. Long name 
format is still proprietary to M$ and requires royalties. 

Right now I have ideas floating in my head and nothing solid to start doing a PCB. Still in the 
eval state. Maybe after Christmas it will be more concrete hardware wise. I need to finish a 
bit more on the GIME section to really be ready to commit start on PCB layout.


james