[Coco] Re: Coco Digest, Vol 12, Issue 25

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 11:02, Andrew wrote:
> I 
> don't think the future of the CoCo is in hardware, but in software. I am 
> not talking emulation here (unless we can somehow get all of the ROMs 
> for emulators to be released to the community), but something new 
> running in software. This could be the "base" of a new CoCo (with extra 
> CoCo-like BASIC commands). Done right, it could be made very portable 
> (via gcc) to a TON of hardware, both now and in the future...


An interesting idea. I'm inclined more toward updated, upgraded
hardware, but a software only solution (other than pure emulator) would
be interesting.

Maybe if the Coco experience could somehow be extruded out of the
emulator and made part of the regular environment. For example, it would
be cool if you could have a shell based on Cocoish BASIC and be
compatible with Coco (straight BASIC) programs. 6809 ML programs could
be emulated, but it would be better if it was integrated into the
environment, such that any Linux shell would know how to load a 6809
machine language program as easily as an ELF executable. Also, it would
need to be able to mount .DSK images, and deal with rom pak files.

Maybe a coco themed desktop environment? What would you put?

I've never liked emulators, since they confine the emulated computer to
a single window. I'd prefer something that was integrated if folks went
this route.

-- John.