[Coco] Expanding features via FPGA’s & VCC

[Zippster]

I have to agree that the big question is who will write software
to take advantage of new features.

With FPGAs we can implement darn near any hardware we can
think of, but without software… well…

I’m fully expecting that no one will write anything for the FPGA
board I’m working on for the cart port, and that the number of people
wanting one for interfacing projects will probably be something I can
count on my fingers.  It’ll still be a cool project for my purposes though  :)

I do plan on implementing drivers and code so that it will be useable
as a Wordpak type board for 80 column text through the VGA port,
RS232 ports, and PWM sound (CoCo uploaded samples), so it may find
some favor there.

Just set up my new reflow oven so that I can do BGAs.  Looks promising,
now I just have to finish designing that PCB.  :)

- Ed




> On Nov 4, 2015, at 8:35 PM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
> On 4/11/2015 5:26 PM, James Ross wrote:
> 
>> I don’t know how feasible it would be, but what might be interesting
>> for expanding graphics (and sound) via the FPGA’s would be if they
>> could be implemented through a type of “Hardware Acceleration” so the
>> drivers would setup and emit small commands to the hardware as
>> opposed to having the 6x09 CPU loaded down doing them.
> 
> The obvious first candidate would be sprites. They're trivial to implement in an FPGA. But how do you 'standardise' them and who is going to write software to utilise them?
> 
>>> I had over 50 people "hounding" me to get VCC to open source and
>>> not one has offered to help work on it.
> 
> The thinking being that if it's open source, them _someone_ (else) will work on it! ;)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> |    Mark McDougall    |  Error: witty remark not found!
> | <http://pacedev.net> |
> 
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