[Coco] MCC-216

Frank Pittel fwp at deepthought.com
Wed Jan 2 21:04:23 EST 2013


On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 06:05:29AM -0600, Allen Huffman wrote:
> On Jan 1, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
> > There are game pads and joysticks available for the mcc-216. From what I can tell there's a usb port of some sort so we
> > should be able to connect it to a pc for drivewire support. Then again with an SD card slot it might be better to have
> > a drivewire type of server in the box using the SD card. I can get 16GB cards for less then $10. Imagine 16Gig of disk
> > on a coco with no external drive connections. Personally if cartridges could be "installed" into the 2MB of flash I'd be
> > happy to lose the slot.
> 
> DriveWire is great, but ideally we still need something with full compatibility. RGB-DOS/HDB-DOS/B&B etc. cannot work with all software. Emulation of an FD1773 (or whatever it is) floppy controller that then turns in to SD storage would still be best.

Agreed
 
> Another issue is how easy is it to clone copy protected discs. At this point, perhaps "everything" exists and has been cloned to disk images, but if I were to get such a virtual CoCo, I'd want to sit down and start feeding my huge boxes of 5 1/4" floppies in to the thing making my own images. True FD1773 could let me read my 42 track discs (I did that alot with patches to DECB and OS-9 to get more storage), 80 track discs, etc.

That would a question for people a lot smarter to me.
 
> Other than potential mysteries inside the GIME (if there are any), hardware emulation of a CoCo via FPGA seems like the best best, but if it cannot use true CoCo hardware, it might as well be a small X86 box running MESS.

There was a time I would have agreed with you. Then I got the DE1 board and got the coco3fpga image. For me it feels like a real coco3. I can't
explain why exactly but it's an order of magnitude better then an emulator running on a PC.

 
> With the Commodore 64-on-a-chip product (the joystick), Atari 2600-on-a-chip product (Flashback 2) and various Nintendo-on-a-chip products, I wonder what approach they took to emulate full systems like that?

>From what I understand the commodore joystick was developed with on an fpga and the commercial product was done with an asic.

The Other Frank



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