[Coco] Latest LWTools not available for Windows 32 bit

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 16 March 2021 08:20:27 Bruce W. Calkins wrote:

> Going off list.
>
> >>>> Anyway keep fighting the good fight!
> >>>
> >>> Do I get my choice of weapons?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks Eric.
> >>>
> >>> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> >>
> >> CoCo's at 20 paces?
> >>
> >> Bruce W.
> >
> > Shirley you jest. For a moment, I had more permanent fixes in mind.
> >
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
>
> Perhaps a CoCo joust?
>
> BWC  ;)

But that would be harder on the coco's than on the contestants. ;)

And we are getting to the point where there are not enough coco's still 
functional already.  What I'd like to see next, is mame or something 
similar, running on an old rpi-3b, something that one could hide in a 
case of a coco whose mobo has died. I think even a pi3b would be faster 
than a coco even if we tried to kill it emulating the gime chip.

Here is a thought. The $65 mesa 7i90hd interface card has 72 i/o pins it 
can update at megahertz speeds, and its driven from the pi at an SPI 
bus, 3 gpio wires, speed of about 40 megabaud using a packet of data 
format of 4 8 bit bytes. I am driving a 1400 lb, 80 year old Sheldon 
11x56 lathe to far more accuracy than the wear and tear of its ways can 
actually do even with laser generated compensation maps for all of it, 
and doing it at 10x the speed an experienced operator could do it in 
1960.

That we ought to be able to drive a whole coco3 with.  All we really have 
to worry about is the coco's i/o, everything else can be emulated. And 
with 72 lines of read or write data, (we have to segregate it to 34 
lines becuase it can't read and write to the same line, but thats 
fixable) we could do a lot more than the coco's limited I/O addressing 
scheme allows, something you can recall I have ranted about several 
times at length over the last 25 years. Because they weren't conscious 
enough to decode that top page of ram, which could have been done by 
another 20 cents worth of 74138's, they threw away i/o space for 14 more 
pluggin cards, seven between the pia's and 7 more between the top pia 
and floppy at $FF40. And there is similarly wasted space above the gime 
image ending at $FFA0 on the coco3's to the IRQ table at $FFF0, about 16 
more 4 byte wide slots could live there too. But orders from on high 
crippled it because they wanted to sell UP to the pc junk. Worse yet, 
they allowed the PC folks to design by the same rules.

Sigh... Bean counters, we ought to have a bounty on them.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>