[Coco] Any news on the so called CoCo4 or Next CoCo

[Mark McDougall]

On 23/10/2010 4:04 AM, Frank Swygert wrote:

> On the FPGA side -- would it be possible to modify one of those proprietary
> cards (in software/FPGA) and tack onto an existing order to reduce costs,
> assuming there is one that provides suitable video?

If you mean the proprietary boards we've designed for our customers, then 
(in practice) no. We don't own the IP unfortunately, and have no right to 
manufacture that design, or even an altered design, ourselves.

> I would prefer a compact hardware solution as
> well, it's just not been truly feasible. Total cost with a $200 board would
> still be around $300 (minus monitor), and then you can't do anything else
> with it.

The biggest cost in any Coco4 design - whether a full design from scratch or 
an add-on for an existing FPGA platform - is going to be interfacing to 
legacy hardware. The cost is incurred in both pin count and logic level 
translation.

There are probably dozens of FPGA boards out there, some cheaper than the 
DE1, that can readily run Coco3FPGA. Choose any board with VGA out and some 
SRAM and interfacing a PS/2 keyboard and RS-232 is cheap and trivial.

But then if you want a cartridge port, interface to analogue joysticks, 
composite video, SD/MMC/IDE/floppy... the cost starts to add up *very* quickly.

Of course a small market (small production runs) only makes matters worse.

So your $300 Coco is probably a little way off just yet. :(

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"