[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: [CoCo] Atari and Amiga comparison

[James Diffendaffer]

>Well the Amiga was better in many ways but the great thing about
>the CoCo 3 is a low entry price because most of it's functions were
>cpu driven. If you wanted you could add a sound cart,
>a no halt disk controller, an RS232 serial cart as well as the OS9
>operating system and all these things freed
>up the 6809 to concentrate on driving the graphics. The point is
>you had options you didn't have with the Amiga. And I am referring
>to the Amiga 500 for comparison purposes. No one here is suggesting
>the CoCo 3 could compare with machines based on later 680x0
>cpu's and coprocessors.
>
>It's too bad the CoCo line didn't continue like the Amiga and Atari
>did. One wonders what would have been if it had.
>
>
>Roy 

Well, that all depends on how you look at it.
Yeah you could buy the computer cheap... but then what?

By the time you add all that stuff plus a mouse, deskview (which how
much software supports?), a parallel port, expanded RAM, more disk
capacity... you are spending as much as you would have for an Amiga
500.  And the 500 was more expandable, a real time clock comes with
the trapdoor RAM upgrade and the 500 is faster as is.  The 68010
offered around a 10% speedup for $25 and there are accelerator boards
that plug into the 68000 socket that are much faster.  Not to mention
ALL the games actually supported the Amiga's sound.  The S&S Pack was
pretty expensive when it came out and how many games support it?  A
dozen?  The Stereo Pack?  Even less?
Even if every commercial game released for the coco supported them
that wouldn't equal the number of games on the Amiga.

Have you even seen some of the demos for the Amiga?  Don't even try to
tell me a cOcO III :) can come close.  Even to a 500.  The first 12 on
this DVD only require a 500. 
http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

I'm not trying to rain on the Coco parade here... it's just that the
only way the Coco can compete is base price alone.
Now if they had come out with a Coco 4 that added DMA driven audio,
disk and a blitter... I wouldn't call it a blowout.  Still, Motorola
bailed on the 6809 and without at least an 8Mhz version I'm not sure
the machine could have gone any further anyway.
Even the Coco3 should have had a larger palette to chose from to begin
with since the Atari had a larger one even though it was released in
the '70s.


BTW, I thought the term "CoCo" came about in Color Computer Magazine
but I'm not going to wast time checking.