[Coco] The evolution of the Coco..

[Nickolas Marentes]

I've brought this idea up before but here goes again...

What about using a Micro ATX PC mainboard with all I/O onboard and
reprogramming the BIOS flash chip with a 6809/CoCo emulator.

In this way, instead of booting the system to an OS via disk, it would
excecute the CoCo emulation permanently.

There is no hardware development time, the system would run full speed and
faster CoCo emulation thanks to the speed of Intel CPU's nowadays, we'd have
most of the I/O that we need such as Parallel - Serial - USB -VGA and it
could be later enhanced to be a CoCo4 by supporting the 24 bit graphic modes
of the standard onboard VGA.

The board would as small as the existing CoCo PCB and could be placed in a
compact MicroATX case with power supply or someone could design a new box to
give the CoCo4 a distinct CoCo appearance.

Have it boot to OS-9 off the IDE hard disk and you have a fast OS-9 machine.

Is this possible or is this just another one of my outlandish ideas like
expanding the CoCoFests? (which no-one seems to be interested in due to a
lack of feedback so far)

Nick Marentes