[Coco] CoCo emulation on a Compaq Internet Appliance?

[Joel Ewy]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> At 01:47 PM 10/22/2007, you wrote:
>> I just remembered....
>> The port on the side is actually a PCMCIA. I had to use a CF to
>> PCMCIA adapter...
>> Maybe other PCMCIA cards can be used? I seem to remember that it only
>> has one slot that is needed for the CF card....
>>
>> Diego
>
>
>
> Bummer.  That's an extra part needed.  I thought I'd been reading that
> the slot is for CF cards, but I guess I'm wrong.  In that case, it
> might be wise to also check for a PCMCIA-based memory card instead. 
> Ofcourse with my luck there's plenty available but maybe can't be
> booted from.
>
I think the PCMCIA CF adapters are still widely available and reasonably
inexpensive.  I've used one on an old junker laptop running Windows 98
and Debian Linux for removable auxiliary storage.  Works out of the box
with no special drivers on both of those systems.  And PCMCIA is old
enough, that I believe it actually has reasonably good support in DOS --
at least much better than USB does.  I think you need to load some kind
of card services software in order to make PCMCIA work in DOS, and I'm
not quite sure where to find that, other than the distribution disks
from an old laptop.  But I think your chances of getting a PCMCIA CF
adapter to work in DOS are far better than USB.

Now, if you want to boot from CF on that machine, your best bet is
probably using a CF IDE adapter.  Then the CF card looks just like a
hard drive to the PC, so booting will not pose any problem.  This
requires no software support of any kind.  The downside is that CF isn't
hot swappable when used in IDE mode.  But if you don't yank it out while
the power is on, you could mount the CF IDE adapter right at the edge of
the case and cut a slot in the side for access to the CF card.  Then,
with power off, you can swap CF "personality modules" without opening up
the case, and switch easily between different emulations.

And if you can make the PCMCIA adapter work in DOS, then you have the
best of both worlds.  You can have (cold) swappable CF emulation
personality modules that plug into the IDE interface, and hot swappable
disk image storage in the PCMCIA slot.

JCE
> So tell me more about your CoCo emulation in the Compaq unit so I can
> at least know that Keil's or JV's emulator will run at a decent speed
> or faster, etc.  Will it run the JV CoCo 3 emulator?  Did you ever
> boot into a NitrOS-9 .dsk image.
>
> Thanks for the info.
>
>
>
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