[Coco] What would a CoCo successor have to have as a minimum?

[gene heskett]

On Sunday, November 21, 2010 06:51:10 pm Mark McDougall did opine:

> On 22/11/2010 9:03 AM, Theodore (Alex) Evans wrote:
> > You can reduce memory contention through a
> > number of means. For one thing there is such a thing as dual-port
> > memory.
> 
> Which is very, very expensive. You won't be slapping 1/2 Meg of
> dual-port memory on a board, believe me!
> 
AIUI, with the fpga, we could well simulate the dual port by interleaving 
the writes with the reads, essentially using the memory as a large depth 
fifo.  I don't see that as a problem other than implementing the concept on 
one corner of the fpga.  This might be a good excuse to learn about the 
Propeller chip and use it to handle the gfx from primitives fed from the 
6x09.  That 'limitation' would tend to enforce the 'feel' of a coco anyway.

> > Maybe it is that I see higher resolutions as useful for other things
> > than video games.

Agreed, but I don't think that should be carried to any more extreme than 
it takes to support an economy lcd monitor these days, which seems to be 
1024(or a bit more for the wide screen models, we should shoot for square 
pixels in any event) x768.

> Perhaps, but you need to design for the worst case. A high resolution
> screen would be handy for developing (editing) and word processing. But
> even then, you might be moving/scolling windows with hundreds of kB of
> graphics data...
> 
> Regards,

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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