[Coco] Introduction, cartridge slot proto boards, J&M controllers, and EDTASM pak.

[Mark J. Blair]

On Aug 22, 2013, at 04:19 , Matthew D Stock <stock at bexkat.com> wrote:
> Hi Mark, welcome!  I'm still new to the party myself, but I have a few suggestions.  Regarding the prototyping board you're looking for - I was never able to find one from any of the usual sources that would fit the Coco.  That's one of the reasons I created my bus buffer (http://www.bexkat.com/products.html).  It breaks all of the bus pins out to a header which you can connect to a breadboard or other project.

Thanks! That looks good. I watched your video of it, and I can see that we have some similar ideas for CoCo hardware projects. I've been thinking about making a CoCo cartridge with a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA on it to experiment with. My ideas about what to do with it are mostly the usual stuff; emulate ROM paks, emulate floppy drives, implement a real floppy controller, VGA video output, interface a CF card or IDE drive, and so on. Nothing original, I assure you!


> I'm also finalizing a design for another board that will pull disk and ROM images off of microSD.  I also added an ethernet port for the fun of it.  In the middle of testing the (final?) board layout now.  I hope to have pictures and stuff up soon, but I've been having too much fun playing with the thing.

Very nice. I've also thought about hanging an ethernet port off the CoCo, but I haven't convinced myself yet that there's a good enough use case for it. Does a CoCo have the horsepower to run a TCP/IP stack and have any room left over to do anything with it? I considered using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the network stack. That seems silly, since the processor running the TCP/IP stack could probably emulate the whole CoCo in its spare cycles. One of my more entertaining co-workers likened it to having a team of PhD's spoon-feeding a vegetable in a hospital bed. :)

I opened up the MPI that I bought last night to service the contacts and slide switch, and I was happy to discover that a previous owner has already swapped out the PAL. I did the peek test, and my MPI is already CoCo 3 compatible. Yay!

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/