[Coco] CoCo 4 (or 5) perspectives: close hardware emulation?

[Joel Ewy]

Andrew wrote:
> Joel,
>
> You wrote:
>
> The problem with Linux is that it takes a little while to boot in a
> live-cd-type situation where it has to do a lot of hardware detection
> and autoconfiguring.  Not a long time, but it ain't nuthin' like
> powerin' on that CoCo, man.  But once it gets up and running it's hard
> to beat for stability, and it can be almost completely configured
> away.   FreeDOS would boot in seconds on a modern PC, but wouldn't have
> nearly the hardware support that a modern Linux kernel does.  No USB,
> poor networking.  DOS didn't compare well with the CoCo back in the day
> (at least in terms of price/performance), the only real benefit you'd
> get from it now is the ability to take advantage of the speed of the
> underlying hardware.  I guess it also would put up little resistance
> against an emulator program that wanted to directly manipulate the
> hardware, but why reinvent that particular wheel?
>
> ---
>
> Just a couple of cents here, but why not simply boot directly into the 
> emulator instead of DOS or Linux? In effect, the emulator becomes the 
> operating system. I guess I am thinking something like a hybrid between 
> one of the emulators and FreeDOS, so you gain all the hardware interface 
> functionality from FreeDOS for the emulator, but you don't have to have 
> all the extra DOS stuff. If done right, I imagine it could look, feel, 
> and work almost identical to DECB - and if the emulation is kept tight 
> (and you had the ROM images or something similar), OS-9 and NitrOS9 
> should still work (or be tweaked to work).
>
>   
So, for instance, morph the emulator into a replacement for FreeDOS'
command.com.  I don't know that that would help much with boot time --
that would depend on the hardware.  But it would help cut down the size
of the distribution and might make it possible to stuff the entire
system into a really small memory device.  There is a ROMOS project (
http://rayer.ic.cz/romos/romose.htm ) that allows you to boot FreeDOS
from an EPROM or flash ROM.  The author of ROMOS says that some PC
BIOSes don't use all the space in their flash ROM, and are designed in a
modular fashion that makes it possible to wedge a little more code in
there.  Or you can put it in a homebrew ISA card or possibly the ROM
socket on an ISA (or maybe even PCI?) expansion card, such as the net
boot ROM on an ethernet card.
Though I haven't played with this yet, I suspect that boot times would
be nearly instantaneous -- after the POST has finished.
> There would still be a startup delay, but I don't think that is a real 
> deal-breaker, otherwise no one would use any computer anywhere. 
Oh, I agree.  It's just that if I'm going to be emulating a CoCo *in
lieu of* a real, hardware CoCo, and dedicating a computer to the
purpose, it will be a real slap in the face to have to endure a long
boot process.  I get plenty of that every day.  It's just a pet peeve of
mine that the faster computers get the longer it takes them to stand at
attention and be at my service.  :)
> The 
> issue of network and USB hardware would still be there, but plenty of 
> open-source code is out there for getting most of the basic stuff going.
>
>   
Therein lies the beauty of Open Source...
> Does this sound like a good (or at least interesting) approach, or am I 
> being daft here...?
>
> Andrew L. Ayers
> Glendale, Arizona
>   
Makes sense to me.

JCE