[Coco] COCO4 Emulator

[Alex Evans]

In any group of enthusists for old computers there are a few major
groups including the emulation crowd and the hardware crowd.  The
emulation crowd wants the best emulation possible (possibly including
extentions) and the hardware crowd generally feels that there is
nothing quite like the real hardware.  You are not going to satisfy the
hardware crowd with anything other than a hardware CoCo 4, now maybe
you can have your emulator to debug the hardware and develop apps for
it, but it could never be an end itself for them.

As far as some specifics you have mentioned.  The CoCo 3 can display 16
colors at a time, and has no 8 color mode at all.  The CoCo 1/2 can
display 9 colors at a time in any of the semigraphics modes.  You
proposed a machine with more than 2M memory and smaller memory pages. 
It should be taken into consideration that in the CoCo 3 the 2M limit
is what you get for a max of 256-8k pages.  From what I understand it
would take some pretty serious changes to make Nitros9 use more than a
single byte for page numbers, and I am certain that it would break
nearly all of the software that uses paging directly.  As for DOS
(BASIC) using all of the memory, ML applications already can, and for
BASIC this is merely a software issue.  You just need to rewrite the
interpreter to take advantage of more of the memory.

--- John Donaldson <johnadonaldson at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>    The main reason I brought up this question, is hardware is
> expensive 
> and takes a very long time to develope for a market like ours.
> Example 
> is the "Superboard" that Mark and Boisy are working on.
> Theirs is not on the market yet. It WILL, but it takes time and
> MONEY. I 
> have attented many COCO fest and heard others wish the COCO had a
> bigger 
> screen, the CPU run faster, use more than 8 colors at one time and it
> 
> had more memory.
> 
>    If we are going to try and get more people interested in the COCO,
> 
> more coming to the fest, and keep it alive, we really need to enhance
> it 
> as much as possible but still keep the COCO alive inside it. This is
>  why I envision a COCO4 Emulator. I don't think there will every be 
> another hardware COCO. Even the current COCO2/3 hardwares are getting
> 
> scare and scarer. Look how hard it is to get monitors, thus the 
> RGB-Svideo and VGA devices that have been developed.  It would evolve
> 
> more and faster as a emulator. As time goes on, more features can be 
> added and enhancements made easier. Put the source code on the net 
> respository so that developers can get access to it for enhancments,
> bug 
> fixes, and new features. This would allow in one since a "committe 
> developed system". Similar to how Linux was developed.
> 
>   Either keeping it as a emulator or porting it as a real Intel/AMD
> OS 
> is where I see the COCO going.
> Whether it is a emulator or a native OS, there are plenty of older 
> hareware system in the used market. The COCO4 could be mated up with
> a 
> cheap hardware system, setup to boot when the system is turned
> on. Someone could make these up, preload and ready to go, then take
> them 
> to a fest and sell them.
> 
> 
>  
>  
> 
> 
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