[Coco] Verilog CoCo 3?

[Tim Fadden]

I guess I just don't get it.  Everybody talks about gpl licences, and 
making money etc.  The 6809 is a dead end.  I will continue to mess with 
my coco, and enjoy it.  But be realistic!  Its a hobby, like collecting 
old toasters!  Sure If I see some product, I could use. Like a rgb to 
vga adapter, which I am waiting with much anticipation to get. I will 
buy it. But somebody to think that they are going to produce some thing 
to make a profit from is smoking something funny!  IMHO.  If someone 
does make it big, hooray for them, but the chance is next to nill.  Why 
is everybody so fired up about licencing some thing that at best 100 
people would buy, and about half of them would only buy it to help out 
the creator?  THIS IS A HOBBY we should be sharing freely.  If you want 
to "protect" you code or make a bunch of money, you belong on some other 
platform.  Any coco related  thing I have is shareable to any one in 
need of it.  Not necessarily for horders.  Although I am a pack rat 
myself! ha ha ha

Now, back to Team Fortress II to  on my 3.2 gig dual proc 8meg ram 5 
terrabyte disk multimedia PC running Vista 64 bit.  Which by the way is 
too complicated for one person to program anything of any marketability 
by themselv's. But thats where the cash is.  I have written a few coco 
utils that is are usefull though, like a print deamon written in 
assembler, and a checkbook/finance program written for MV.  I learned a 
bunch doing it, but it aint worth squat!

I have been away from the coco scene for quite some time, now I know why 
I left....  unfortunately.

P.S.  By the way I am not affended, not mad, not leaving.  he he he Go 
ahead and blast me, I got thick skin, and, I have lived with my self 
long enough not to care much about what other people say. ha ha ha  I 
have found that usually if something bugs ya it's because it's close to 
the truth!  If it was wackers, it wouldn't bug ya!

Tim Fadden


Joel Ewy wrote:
> David Gacke wrote:
>   
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>>  
>>
>> Whatever happened to the guy with the Verilog CoCo3 implementation?  I found
>> a link in the archives, but the website that it pointed to is gone it seems.
>>
>>   
>>     
> That was Gary Becker, I believe.  I haven't been to the web site for a
> while, so I didn't know it was completely gone.  I had noticed with
> great disappointment, that the downloads had been removed and he had
> left a cryptic note about "rethinking" his FPGA projects, whatever that
> means.  But it didn't disappear before I had downloaded the source and
> the documentation PDF.
>   
>>  
>>
>> Also, was that code he had posted GPL'd or similar?  If so, could someone
>> please send it to me, or post a link to it.  I'd like to do some poking
>> around in my spare time.
>>
>>   
>>     
> I am fairly certain that he mentioned the GPL by name on his web site. 
> Unfortunately, I saw no "COPYING" file, and no mention of any license
> whatsoever in the source or the documentation PDF, so I would say that
> means that it has not, technically, been released under the terms of the
> GPL, or any other recognized Open Source license.
>
> I hope it's not the case, but it looks like we may have another
> marvelous project, 99% complete, abandoned by its original author,
> hiding in plain sight, just out of reach of a potential community of
> collaborators, behind a glass wall of copyright law.
>
> But before we get too fired up...  My recollection was that in Gary's
> posts to this list, he seemed to express an interest in making his FPGA
> CoCo a community project.  It seemed clear to me that, at least at one
> time, he was very open to collaboration, and wanted to share his work. 
> He did post the source code after all.  I also got the feeling that his
> attitude soured as he saw the tone of some of the discussion on this
> list, but I would have to look back at old posts.  I can understand
> being put off by some of the sniping that goes on.  Perhaps we could all
> take a civility pill, and wash it down with a dose of skin thickener.
>
> It would certainly be worth having somebody very politely and tactfully
> contact Gary and see what his present intentions are and what he would
> have us do with any copies of his source code that we may already have
> downloaded.  Needless to say, it is up to us individually to choose
> whether we comply with his wishes on this point or not.
>
> On the positive side, there are already other CoCo-related chunks of
> Verilog/VHDL out there.  The CPU core Gary used with his design was
> written by John Kent, and is quite definitely licensed under the GPL. 
> It has been criticized as amateurish, and isn't cycle-accurate (neither
> is the 6309 running in native mode), but can apparently be clocked to at
> least 12 MHz, and most importantly of all, it exists, it works, and it
> is actually available under an Open Source license.  I'd rather have a
> sucky, amateurish, functional, and available CPU core that can't be
> yanked away on a whim than nothing at all.  If it's bad, make it
> better.  If nothing else, it can serve as a stand-in processor until
> somebody comes up with a better one.  Good commercial software is a fine
> thing, but I'll take bad Open Source over proprietary vaporware any day.
>
> In addition to John Kent's 6809, I believe that Mark McDougall has done
> quite a bit of work on an FPGA CoCo 1/2, and James Daggett has been
> working on a GIME replacement.  So even if Gary Becker's code becomes
> lost for the purposes of collaboration (which we don't definitively know
> yet), there is other work that could be brought together, if the
> respective authors are willing to share.
>
> I think that part of the problem the CoCo community has in finishing up
> projects is that they all tend to stay one-man-shows.  I'll admit that
> in my weaker moments I still have ludicrous fantasies about starting
> something big with a project that begins in the basement in my spare
> time.  (Spare time?  That's the biggest joke of it all!)  The mythology
> of Gates, Wozniak, and Jobs looms large in the imaginations of us all,
> so it's hard to give up the notion that our hobby could become our
> livelihood, or at least could pay for itself.  It's difficult to give up
> control of an idea and let a bunch of other people get in there and
> monkey around with it.  But the more we focus on how much time we are
> spending working on our babies, and how little others appreciate our
> efforts, the more bitter, angry, and depressed we become.  This is no
> fundamentalist free software screed, and it is not an attempt to tell
> anybody else what to do with their projects, nor is it a criticism in
> any way of those who put in monumental efforts and ask for payment for
> their work.  I have great respect for Boisy Pitre, Mark Marlette, Roger
> Taylor, and anybody else who makes and sells a product for the CoCo.
>
> But people keep on stressing that this is a hobby, and that 15-25 year
> old publications for an obsolete computer will never again have enough
> monetary value to be worth suing over, et cetera.  Previous discussions
> of FPGA CoCos have become mired in speculation about the difficulties of
> turning such a thing into a commercial product.  Fine.  Forget it. 
> There will likely be no Next Generation CoCo that you can buy, already
> assembled, in a box, from a single vendor.  There are undoubtedly people
> willing to buy peripheral devices, software, accessories, an so on, but
> there probably isn't a market for a mass-produced, conventional product
> on the scale of a whole CoCo-compatible computer.
>
> But why on earth do we have to limit our thinking to such grandiose
> outcomes?  Just because it'll never become a shrink-wrapped product,
> produced by the boat loads in China, filling the shelves of your local
> Wal-Ly World, played with for five hours, and then dumped in the
> landfill, doesn't mean it's not a project worth doing.  In fact, in my
> mind, the rough and open nature of such a project makes it much more
> interesting  than some closed, polished box.  One of the best features
> of the CoCo was that it was a diamond in the rough.  All those little
> ads in the back of Rainbow Magazine were because the CoCo had so much
> potential in the form of "room for improvement".  I know my capabilities
> are humble.  But I just might be able to contribute something of worth,
> however minimal, to a real, honest-to-goodness, collaborative Next-Gen
> CoCo effort.  The rougher and more open it is, the more chance there is
> for me to contribute -- and that's what would motivate me to take part.
>
> Keep your expectations low and you'll be less likely to be
> disappointed.  Gary Becker built his FPGA CoCo on a ready-made FPGA
> development board.  It was somewhere in the $100-$200 range.  We don't
> need an assembled, tested, branded CoCo in a box.  We need a freely
> distributable, collaboration friendly, HDL CoCo core that individual
> users can, if they can supply the necessary hardware and expertise,
> build into their own custom FPGA CoCo-compatible system.  Once that is
> available, there will at least be the groundwork in place for a
> community of developers to grow around it.  There will be plenty of
> opportunity to develop and market little kits that make it easier for
> ordinary users to set one up for themselves, or add new functionality. 
> Keep the design modular and people can even sell commercial plug-in
> replacements for the HDL components.
>
> You can put hours and hours of solitary effort into a thing, get mad,
> quit, and have wasted a chunk of your life.  End of story.  Or you can
> put hours and hours of effort in, slap a GPL (or Open Source license of
> your choice) on it, put it out there, and open yourself up to the
> possibility, however slight, that somebody else might just give
> something back to you in the form of collaboration.  Sure, you're taking
> a chance that nobody cares, or has the time or expertise to do any more
> with your baby than what you have done yourself.  In that instance,
> you're no worse off than if you had just picked up your marbles and gone
> home.  Better yet, you can make a real effort to get others to
> contribute and collaborate.  Sure, it may in the end amount to nothing. 
> But the chances of a project going somewhere are far better if you don't
> insist on going it alone, and if others share a vested interest in
> seeing their work realized as well. 
>
> Let us take it for granted that, for the most part, the market for
> CoCo-related items on the scale of entire computer systems is tiny and
> sporadic at best.  Let us simply assume that any such development must
> either be the colossal effort of one entirely dedicated individual, who
> is likely to be profoundly disappointed at the lack of a massive
> groundswell of eager and wealthy buyers; or else an entirely
> collaborative labor of love by the CoCo community to produce a successor
> to the Color Computer line that is not tied to any particular hardware
> implementation, or to the fortunes of any company or individual.  The
> rewards will likely not be monetary, though if such a project comes to
> fruition, I do see opportunities for enterprising developers.  Instead,
> what one would get for participating in such a project would be the
> enjoyment of collaboration, the expression of creativity, and the thrill
> of the hack.
>
> Obviously if Gary's project had been licensed under the GPL, and if
> Rainbow Magazine was re-released with a Creative Commons license, we
> wouldn't have all this hand-wringing, sniping, flaming, accusation,
> threatening, and whining.  We could simply all get down to the business
> of playing, working, and talking about the Color Computer and its
> relatives, which is what I think we all really want to do on this list
> anyway.  Those things are what they are, and we may be able to do little
> or nothing about them.  But if we wanted to, we could take what we do
> have and begin new projects that are collaborative and open from the outset.
>
> FWIW, IMHO, the views expressed here, bla, bla, bla...
> JCE
>   
>>  
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>>  
>>
>> Dave Gacke
>>
>>  
>>
>>
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>>   
>>     
>
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