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

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 15 March 2007, Dan Olson wrote:
>>> I've often wondered what things would have been like if the coco had
>>> been built around a 68000 unstead of a 6809.
>>
>> It would have cost $2000 instead of $200, no one would have bought
>> one, and we wouldn't be talking about it.
>
>Or Tandy might have named it the Model 16 instead :)  More realistly
> they would have introduced such a machine in the mid-80s as the follow
> on to the coco2.  Too bad there was never a 16 bit follow-on to the
> 6809 that fell somewhere between the 6809 and 68000, similar to the
> 65816.
>
That would have been the 6309 maybe, or maybe the 68070, which was a cmos 
clone of the 68000.

BTW, for all those folks who are claiming the 68000 was a 32 bit cpu, 
you'll have to stretch the truth a bit, like saying the 6x09 was a 16 
bitter just because the internal registers were that wide.

The 68000/68070's hardware address bus was only 24 bits, so its ability to 
take advantage of bigger memory maps was damaged from the gitgo, and that 
buss was stuck at 7.16 mhz, a garden snails pace.

The amiga's didn't get to be called a full 32 bit box until the 
accelerator cards with 680(20-30-40-60) cpu's on them came out, and 
because of the bus limitations, similar to the ISA buss of yore, any 
extra memory had to be common on the accelerator card because the bus in 
the big box rigs was only 24 bit.  My now dead one (the 30GB hard drive 
upchucked) has a PP&S 68040 card in it, with 64 megs of dram in simm's on 
it.  This was, in its day, a truly powerhouse machine.

Booting one of those was an exercise because if you had several partitions 
to mount, (they were limited to a hair under 4GB IIRC) there wasn't 
enough available ram in locations external to the accelerator card to 
mount them all until the card had been awakened and enabled, each of 
these steps required what we called a software reset.  To bring all of my 
hardware up was the result of 3 full software resets after each new piece 
of the hardware was enabled.  It wasn't a lot faster in booting than this 
linux box is to a runlevel 3 login.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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