[Coco] DriveWire is just a hobby (Was: DW4 on MAc & Linux)

[Al Hartman]

I'm sure I've read that people have reproduced the Coco and the Coco 3 using 
discrete TTL. The Coco3FPGA project shows it's doable that way.

Since Dragon, and many others licensed their ROMs from Microsoft, that would 
be doable.

If the machine just had a boot ROM to boot NitrOS9, or empty sockets to 
transplant ROMS from a Coco, then the licensing thing would be moot.

The Outbound Laptop for the Mac used ROMS from a Mac Plus.

-[ Al ]-

-----Original Message----- 
From: Christopher Smith

If it's just newer hardware we wanted, an enhanced CoCo 2 should be quite 
doable.  The SAM chip was reasonably primitive by modern standards and 
should be reasonably well-documented, I'd guess.  Probably all of that could 
be shoved in a low cost FPGA and you could use another array (... or put 
them on a single larger array) for the CPU.  You could even do a real 6809 
or 6309 if you aren't worried about the parts not being manufactured any 
more.  In theory this should allow speeds in the tens-of-mhz range and you 
could work out a way to support a good deal of memory even above what is on 
the CoCo 3, though if that was all you'd done, the graphics wouldn't be so 
great. :)


... and of course there's the problem of having the time, money and 
inclination to do it, but technically speaking I think the big deal would be 
in terms of the legality of the ROM from the system.  If you want a 
compatible machine, you need a compatible ROM which you're allowed to 
reproduce and perhaps modify slightly for new hardware.

Chris