[Coco] Message from John of gimechip.com

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 11 June 2010, sales at gimechip.com wrote:
>Gene, I used to read the list posts via google - they would show up when I
>would be searching google for coco stuff. I remember seeing your name in
>some of those searches. Thanks for the welcome - most of the stuff I
> design is for the CoCo, but some is for Timex & Sinclair - I hope to find
> a place to post that someday too. I am also working on a clone of the
> Aamber Pegasus which was a neat 6809 machine. It, like the ZX81, used the
> CPU for video generation - if you disable the FIRQ, then the Aamber loses
> video buts is Waaayyyy faster - sort of like the ZX81 FAST mode.
>
>-John

The coco3 is too if the video is killed by the 2nd high speed poke, but the 
caveat there is that without the video, the dram refresh is dependent on 
your program.

The ideas on expanded memory are good.  However, I have a 2 meg disto kit in 
mine, and main memory is never the problem, system memory at the 65k limit 
is.  I often use a ramdisk I wrote to use 1.5 megs of it as a ramdisk for 
compiling work, which takes a load off the disks. 

To than end, I have tried to make the level 3 scheme work since that gives a 
separate paging scheme for rbf vs scf devices, but have not been able to 
make a working boot yet.  If it would be possible to jigger one more address 
bit into the 6309 itself, that problem would go away for all practical 
purposes.  The chances of that happening are somewhere between .000001% of 
slim and none though. But we like to lay awake nights thinking on how to do 
it otherwise. ;-)

On another front, John Kawalski (SockMaster) has some speedup logic that 
runs things at 2x speed for cpu access & normal speed for video, and since 
this gets into the same region of the hardware, maybe Johns ideas can be 
incorporated into your sram kit?  That would be super cool.

-- 
Cheers John, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
<Oryn> anyone know if there is a version of dpkg for redhat?