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

[Andrew]

I don't know if its been noted (and forgive me if it has), but in this 
discussion about a "next gen" CoCo, I seemed to recall that Jeff 
Vavasour had released his emulators as freeware, with source code. This 
was after someone pointed out that only MESS was available with source - 
so I decided to do a sanity check:

http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.html

Well - both emulators (CoCo 2 and 3) are available as Freeware, with 
source code; of course, I am not sure what this kind of license means to 
Jeff, exactly - but I bet if we asked nicely, maybe he might let us fork 
it into a new product.

I don't think when he means "Freeware", that he means public domain. He 
certainly likely doesn't mean GPL, either. Just that he's given his 
blessing to the wide distribution of the emulators for free, with the 
source code.

Now - the source code is Intel 16-bit assembler; not the easiest stuff 
to work with, but not impossible, either. Maybe it could be reverse 
engineered into C/C++ to be compiled with GCC? It probably wouldn't run 
fast in the first iteration, but that would be a nice start. I am sure 
there are other caveats to be had by his version of emulation, too.

One thing to note, though, is that in the source code download for the 
CoCo 3 emulator is "version 1.7" - which added 16 color 640x480 and 256 
color 320x200 modes, support for 16MB of RAM, etc - but he notes it 
might have bugs.

Personally, I think this code (if he would approve?) could be the basis 
for -a- version of a future CoCo; I have found his emulators to be 
fairly well working for DOS emulation - I think any bugs could be worked 
out with time. If this code was married with a stripped down version of 
FreeDOS, such that the boot block of the disk kicked over to this 
program immediately, with FreeDOS providing disk support (and anything 
else) - or if some other method of using the code was done...

If I had the time to pursue such a project (I've done some 16-bit 
assembler coding in DOS - but nothing on this scale); I think I'd 
contact him myself. Hmm - maybe I'll just contact him anyhow...

-- Andrew L. Ayers, Glendale, Arizona