[Coco] Why do a next Gen CoCo? was Any news on the so called CoCo4 or NextCoCo

[Frank Pittel]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:25:28PM -0500, jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
> On 19 Nov 2010 at 13:23, Frank Pittel wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The point I was trying to make is that unless a person (realistically a group of
> > people) pick up the ball and start doing the work of writing software, designing
> > hardware, etc the "coco4" is just a pipe dream. In the case of the coco3fpga there
> > is work being done by a group(?) led by Gary (or is it Gary by himself?). I don't
> > know that anyone is actually working on writing an emulator or extending one of
> > the existing emulators. I've read talk about it being easy to extend mess but I
> > don't know that anyone has done.
> 
> Frank 
> 
> You hit the nail on the head.
> 
> I am finishing up one project and should be close enough by Christmas to start on a FPGA 
> hardware design that I have invisioned. I am talking about PCBs and physical hardware. 
> Right now there is enough HDL code to generate a bare minimum system. I have a slight 
> differnet apporach to Gary on a GIME chip. First off I have written mine in VHDL and not 
> Verilog. Hardware wise I do not care to carry the COCO ROMs inside the FPGA as Block 
> ROMS. If you want to edit and reassemble the RSBASIC code, you then have to regenerate 
> the bit pattern for the FPGA. I think that asks to much of an end user. 
> 
> Instead I invision usign a SPI ROM or even a small boot ROM and possibly the FTDI 
> VenculumII chip and a USB flash drive to boot SECB and put it in SRAM.  There use to be a 
> chip that was DOS on A chip that allowed a MPU like a 6809 to access FAT12/FAT16 
> formatted drives. The VInculum willdo FAT16 and I think FAT32 with 8.3 format. Long name 
> format is still proprietary to M$ and requires royalties. 
> 
> Right now I have ideas floating in my head and nothing solid to start doing a PCB. Still in the 
> eval state. Maybe after Christmas it will be more concrete hardware wise. I need to finish a 
> bit more on the GIME section to really be ready to commit start on PCB layout.

I look forward to being able to buy your fpga coco implementation!

The Other Frank