[Coco] Nick's Survey results

[peak at mail.polarcomm.com]

Mark,
Thank you for your reply! I understand that there is already 
some excellent hardware and software for "real COCO,s" but if 
I wanted to really build a super expanded COCO I would not 
use a true coco at all. Instead I would run a coco emulator 
which would give me the use of all the natives systems 
periferal devices. I could then have hard drives,floppies,CD-
roms or whatever and run at whatever speed my native machine 
would do. For my interests the real beauty of the coco is 
that it is a full computer with video,keyboard etc. in a 
small size. The SAM chip was an excellent product for it,s 
time because it tied together the VDU,DRAM,CPU,roms and I/O 
using an "Interleaved DMA" allowing the cpu access to all 
memory at any time without it(the CPU) having to worry about 
refreshing ram and accessing video memory only during video 
retrace or non refresh times. Of course the SAM,s later 
cousin the GIME also did this.

If I truly wanted to operate a COCO I do have a coco1,several 
coco2,s and a 512k coco3. My interests are a bit different 
though. Thank you from all of us coco,ist for all of your 
fine work in keeping this machinge going in this modern age.

Eric