[Coco] Smalles CoCo ever "re-created"??

[Mark McDougall]

On 21/12/2012 2:10 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:

> That was back in 2005 and was known both as the Commodore 64 30-in-1 and
> the C-64 DTV, and was used in a few other inexpensive TV games products.
	(snip)

Nice summary Bill!

Indeed I have the C64-DTV and 'hacked' it to add keyboard and 1541 (disk 
drive) - mounting it in a plastic zippy box. There's a well documented fix 
for the colours (a few resistors IIRC) that I'm yet to apply.

> A similar feat was accomplished in the Atari Flashback 2
> with the original Atari 2600 architecture (the other Flashback models were
> emulations/simulations), led by Curt Vendel.

I bought the original flashback (for AUD$20) before I learned that it was 
actually a NOAC (NES-On-A-Chip) with ported games. As a result, I have never 
even taken it out of the box.

It might be worth noting that both the C64 and A2600 have freely-available 
FPGA designs; they just need some hardware to run on. Atm they target either 
generic FPGA development kits or, in the the case of the C64, the 
purpose-built C-One and Turbo Chameleon 64 kits. Interested parties may want 
to check out the Chameleon; that would be capable of running the Coco and 
it's quite small!

> I think the reality of both the engineering demands/costs and the
> capabilities of today's low cost platforms (be they FPGA implementations or
> something like a Rasberry Pi), a modern day platform would almost certainly
> be a software emulation layer on some generic hardware, meaning original
> peripherals simply wouldn't work.

Agreed. The Coco simply doesn't have the market share that the C64 enjoyed, 
so we'll never see a mass-produced Coco-On-A-Joystick. Any such device would 
have to come from an enthusiast, and it will be expensive simply due to 
economies of scale.

Regards,

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