[Coco] CoCo4! 50% done!

[Nick Marentes]

> Current CoCo3FPGA has a 12 bit palette, so instead of 64 total colors, 
> you can choose your 16 from 4096.  It also has a real low-res 256 color 
> mode (160x200, with a fixed palette) and an option for double vertical 
> resolution.  So you could do 256 colors at 160x400, or 16 colors from a 
> 4096-color palette at 320x400.  This is out of the box on the DE-1, and 
> can be done on the Spartan board with some hardware modification, which 
> I have done on mine. Interestingly, one of the 256 color modes is the 
> same resolution as the 8-bit composite artifact colors on a stock CoCo 
> 3.  The palettes likely wouldn't be exactly the same, but it would be 
> easy to write software that would use 8-bit color that would run the 
> same on both systems.  Just sayin'.

Clearly, there are several "CoCo4" added features on the FPGA CoCo but I
fear that unless  the hardware is more readily available at a reasonable
price with minimal fuss to setup, we'll never see any new useful programs
ever created for it.

Certainly, the speedup is great for OS-9 apps. Must be great to see Dynacalc
running at 20Mhz!   :)

The FPGA CoCo needs the hardware in more peoples hands. The CoCo3 core has
to be made available on some of these other Retro FPGA computer boards that
already have C64, Amiga and Atari ST cores.

Even then, that may not be enough for such to be "officially" classed as a
CoCo4... more a hardware gurus CoCo3 hack with some bells and whistles
tacked on.

What would be really cool is if someone developed a "CoCo4" FPGA production
prototype that could be presented to Radio Shack with the outcome that they
market and manufacture it as a product. 

Imagine walking in to Radio Shack to buy a CoCo again! Surreal! 

Nick