[Coco] CoCo Progression...

[Steve Batson]

I'm totally amazed at the support the CoCo still gets...I cut my computer 
teeth on the CoCo. I don't have much time or energy to put it into these 
days :(

Anway, I see so much CoCo knowledge here (put's mine to shame) and all the 
ideas that people have and the projects people have ideas for, it creates a 
sincere question of my own.

I see suggestions for projects like:

USB interface for the CoCo (USB 1.1 runs at 12 Mbps and USB 2.0 around 
120-240 Mbps)
Ethernet (adapter most run 10 or 100mbps)

Blue Tooth and the list goes on.

I can see if someone wants to do it for the fun of it or the 
challenge....but it really doesn't seem practical to connect these high 
speed devices to the CoCo from a usage standpoint. Then without some serious 
buffering, the CoCo would not be able to take or send data fast enough. Even 
with it buffered and handled to allow the CoCo to interface, there could 
still be some tremendous delays diminishing the value of what you are 
connecting to through these interfaces.

The other concern that seems to be growing, is that older parts are going to 
continue to get harder to find. It will get to the point where finding 
working CoCo's and compatible parts will be very hard if not impossible. 
This brings me to my question...

I know there are emulators out there, Jeff Vavasour's is pretty decent along 
with some others. I also know people have talked about projects to create a 
next generation CoCo (I don't know what happened to that). My question is, 
wouldn't it make more sense to design emulators that will be 99.9% 
compatible (nothing's perfect) with the real thing and allow plug-in code to 
enhance/extend the CoCo features and interface to the PC hardware. As fast 
as PC's are today compared to the old CoCo, would it really bother anyone if 
they could either put the CoCo Emulator in old compatible mode to control 
speed (for games and stuff), or go into turbo mode to run newer stuff or 
stuff that runs fine at higher speeds?

Just my thoughts and questions. It seems to me that the knowledge here, all 
of this would possible and more productive for improving and growing the 
CoCo.

Steve