[Coco] Semigraphics modes examples

Dave Philipsen dave at davebiz.com
Tue Aug 4 12:19:41 EDT 2015


You can buy a DE-1 (FPGA development board) for $156 + tax & shipping.  
It has 512K SRAM, 4M Flash, 8M SDRAM, VGA, RS232, PS/2, Audio Codec, SD 
card slot and two expansion ports.  There is more than enough logic on 
the board to synthesize a CoCo 3, Apple II/e, Commodore, etc.

I am mostly interested in running NitrOS9 and this board does it well.  
You know how fast a 1.89 MHz CoCo 3 is. Just imagine a computer running 
13 times as fast and you have the CoCo 3 FPGA! Now, it's true that there 
are a few games which may not run on the CoCo 3 FPGA but let's try to 
identify the problems and see if the developer will correct them.  I 
have personally seen a bunch of stuff that runs well on it (including 
games) and it's just a great platform for NitrOS9.  A version was just 
released recently that now supports the SD card under N-OS9. A program 
called 'megaread' measures disk (storage) performance. Drivewire at 
115.2k completes megaread in around 96 seconds (YMMV).  The SD interface 
on the CoCo3 FPGA board with CPU core running at 25 MHz completes it in 
about 3.5 seconds!

On , Stephen Robinson wrote:
> It is also still more expensive to buy a FPGA board than an original
> CoCo3 anyway right? so there still is probably not that much
> motivation, except as insurance for the future.
> 
> On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Nick Marentes <nickma at optusnet.com.au> 
> wrote:
>> On 2/08/2015 1:11 PM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>>> 
>>> Which software specifically can you not run that you would like to?
>>> 
>>> The latest can be found at: 
>>> https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CoCo3FPGA
>>> 
>>> Dave Philipsen
>> 
>> 
>> I remember trying all my CoCo3 games I wrote and none worked (Rupert 
>> Rythym,
>> Space Intruders, Pacman, Gate Crasher)
>> 
>> I remember trying some others and they too failed.
>> 
>> I'll set it up again and try the newest firmware.
>> 
>> 
>> Nick
>> 
>> 
>> --
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