[Coco] What would a CoCo successor have to have as a minimum?
Little John
sales at gimechip.com
Sat Nov 20 15:23:43 EST 2010
What my son and I have done as far as extending CoCo 3 memory was to map
register files (or dual port SRAM) at $FF80-$FF8F. These serve to extend the
MMU to 16-bits. For example, $FFA0 = LSB,$FF80=MSB and so on.This extends
the coco 3's RAM capacity to 512M or 65536 8K blocks, while remaining
compatible with existing software. Using the Video Bank Register (the one
designed by disto to bank the memory as 512K banks for the GIME's video
circuit) allows 256 512K video banks. So the video can be placed in any 512K
bank within the first 128Meg. The CPU can access the entire 512M as 8K
pages. Although the design is complete, it has yet to be prototyped and
tested.
-JohnT-
======
> There is flash memory on the DE1 board and there is 8MBytes of SDRAM which
> to the best of my knowledge is not used.
> Access to extended memory can easily be achieved by mapping in another 8
> bit page register in I/O somewhere to extend the memory.
> This would remain backwards compatible with the CoCo3 as the register
> would not need to be modified for existing programs.
>
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