[Coco] coco3 on a stick auto booting into a hard drive image with Sidekick for navigation

[Francis Swygert]

Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2018 15:50:08 +0000
From: rietveld rietveld <rietveldh at hotmail.com>

Yes    will release a complete .zip with all pc boot files and a complete coco hd image

________________________________
From: Coco <coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com> on behalf of Francis Swygert <farna at att.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 7:35:09 AM


Real nice, especially the "shift-boot-OS9"! I'm assuming that's actually NitrOS9?  Are you planning on offering that image for others to download and install?  Just post the model number stick you have and instructions to load... Frank Swygert
 Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
 803-604-6548

-------------------------------------------------
Great news! You've done a lot of good work, thanks for sharing. Between you, Ron Klein's CoCoPi image (along with Chris Hawks pioneering CoCoPi work) and the CoCo4 FPGA, it looks like the community has a way forward as original equipment ages and gets increasingly hard to find and less reliable for just playing around with. Interfacing to other things, like project boards that plug into the CART slot, is still an issue, but few are doing such things any more. Being able to use the joystick ports and such for small custom interface projects was a big draw for the CoCo, I think, or would be. But there are Arduinos and such for that now that are easier to get and much cheaper. With the added video and sound the FPGA is closest to a "CoCo4". Would be nice if those enhancements were added to the Pi and Stick CoCo emulations... assuming the Pi/Stick has the same capabilities. 

I do think it's important to have the SAME added capabilities across platforms... or keep it CoCo compatible only. Different added features for each would just make it harder to share software across them. Of course the three solutions do have different capabilities, so maybe it's not THAT important to keep them the same. Would just be why one is chosen over one of the others. As long as they maintain a backwards compatibility to at least a CoCo3 (I don't think CoCo1/2 compatibility is that important any more, but that's just my opinion) software can be made to run on all three. Might be some added features (such as 2MB RAM) that they can all share. Enhanced video and sound across all three would be really good to see though.