[Coco] What would your ideal CoCo cartridge do?

[Mark McDougall]

On 29/10/2013 6:57 AM, Fedor Steeman wrote:

> Possibly impossible, but: Enhanced graphics resolution and colours?

Conversely, it's not only possible, but it is in fact the easiest means of 
providing such functionality on the Coco.

You could provide in effect a VGA adapter by snooping bus accesses and 
re-generating the display from a copy of the memory in the cartridge. This 
is exactly what the Carte Blanche card does in the Apple II, for example. 
However, things start to get tricky when you're tweaking the GIME as some 
list members love doing, and your raster timing goes straight out the 
window. So perhaps only feasible for nice text 80-column display...

Of course, providing incompatible, but enhanced, graphics would in some 
sense be easier. By moving the 'display chip' into the cartridge you get to 
maintain all the timings etc.

Regards,

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