[Coco] Becker port

[Michael Furman]

Over the past few years I have been pitching the idea of building a hardware Becker port for real cocos to the hardware wizards in this group.  I had even proposed that it would be possible to interface a Becker port to SPI and that could open up some some possibilities.  For example the ESP8266 does have a SPI access mode which as far as I know has not been has explored.  It also could be interesting to interface to a CH375 usb drive adapter. Wiznet Ethernet adapter, SD card, a lot of possibilities here.

I have a breadboard prototype of a hardware Becker port interface connected to an Arduino Mega but I haven’t had really had much time to work on it lately.

Sent from my iPad

> On Apr 20, 2019, at 7:32 PM, Jeff Teunissen <deek at d2dc.net> wrote:
> 
> On the IRC channel, some of us were discussing the DriveWire "Becker port"
> implemented in emulators and the CoCo FPGA. Specifically, someone thought
> it was something that you would build a cable for with a regular CoCo,
> perhaps thinking it was related to the bit-banger. We got the confused
> person straightened out without too much trouble, and explained what the
> Becker port really was, a dedicated serial DriveWire link.
> 
> We started wondering how useful it might be to have a real-life version of
> the Becker port -- a serial port connection that presents as a read status
> port at $ff41 and a read/write port at $ff42, with enough buffer space to
> fully contain a 'sector read' response, and possibly be able to run at very
> high bit rates without requiring all the CPU a CoCo can apply to it.
> 
> Might such a thing (a high-speed DriveWire accelerator program pak) be
> useful/desirable?
> 
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