[Coco] [Color Computer] coco ethernet project

[James Dessart]

On 4/24/09, jdaggett at gate.net <jdaggett at gate.net> wrote:

> Using a FPGA in front of the CS8900 chip one can reduce the I/O
> requirements to say four bytes. Some simple state machine or even the
> programable state machine Picoblaze would be a nice interface to the
> CS8900 chip.

Right, but how much would that FPGA cost?

> Ah yes this is the fun part. what applications are there that can use this?
>  better yet who is willing to write applications for it. hardware without
>  software is somewhat wasted effort.

Yeah... there are some sample applications that come with uIP, but
they're not necessarily all that useful in general. Who needs a web
server on their CoCo? :)

One thought I had was something like NFS, so the CoCo could connect to
a file server. There are certainly ideas out there from other 8-bit
systems for inspiration. Someone turned their C64 into a streaming
audio server, playing the SID output to a client over IP. What would
the CoCo's strength be that could be translated into a server app?

At the time I started thinking about the project, though, I partly
just wanted to prove the CoCo could do it. It's definitely possible,
more a question of just getting it done. Unfortunately I didn't have
the opportunity to finish the project.

-- 
James Dessart
<http://skwirl.com/cody/>