[Coco] New topic - Coco 4

[Paul Fitch]

90% of the work has already been done in the Coco 3 emulators.  

Remember what a Coco 4 is SUPPOSED to be.  A direct upgrade of the Coco 3.

What did we want that upgrade to have?  More memory, higher resolution
graphics, full serial/parallel ports, faster speed.

Well, the Coco 3 emulators already give you faster speed and more memory.
Of course, the DECB side needs some work which really has to be handled in
the "chips" governing memory access and patches to the basic roms.  But the
memory is there.  So the Coco 4 should be a matter of taking the emulator
code and giving it "hooks" into the PCs serial/parallel/USB/Bluetooth ports,
and giving it VGA style (or better) graphics.

Hitachi took the 6809 and made it better.  A made up (software only) chip
could do the same to the 6309.  Add more registers and the op codes to allow
tru 16/32 bit operations WITHOUT breaking the 8/16 bit stuff we already
have.  Done with forethought, the Coco4 could run all Coco 3 software out of
the box.

Now in the hardware world, it makes no sence to take an 8-bit core and add
registers and such to bootstrap it into a 32 bit chip, because silicon real
estate is expensive.  In software its no big deal, relatively speaking.

What would you call this mystical chip?  I'd call it the 2012 Processor<g>.
It development started today, that's about when I'd expect to be able to use
it<g>.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com 
> [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On Behalf Of Bill Cousert
> Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 5:30 PM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: [Coco] New topic - Coco 4
> 
> http://www.c64upgra.de/c-one/
> 
> The C-One - the world's first reconfigurable computer. 
> There's been a lot of talk over the last couple decades about 
> building a Coco 4. Lots of talk, little to no action. So why 
> not start with the C-One and create a "Coco 4" module for it? 
> Much of the work has already been done.
> 
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