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

[Mark McDougall]

On 24/11/2010 1:34 AM, Alex Evans wrote:

> Stick it!

Apologies Alex. I was in a rather cynical mood yesterday and you bore the 
brunt of it. It's no excuse of course, but it is difficult to convey tone in 
an email, and wasn't meant as harshly as it came across. Again, sorry.

> I was saying it would be nice.  Hell, you aren;'t giving people crap
> about wanting to use 68k features (or even a 68k) in this proposed CoCo4.

Whilst I believe using another CPU (eg. 68k) is pretty much pointless, I 
agree that an enhanced 6x09 would be nice, if perhaps not as 
straight-forward as some would hope. Examples like the 8068 & 68516 show how 
difficult it is to provide backwards-compatibility yet still be 'nice' to 
program for.

> Great 512k of dual port ram can be had for $40.

The only high density dual-port (S)RAMs that I am familiar with are accessed 
much like SDRAM (without refresh) so there are setup latencies and are 
really meant to be read/written in burst mode. As discussed these introduce 
complexities of their own.

If you have other devices in mind, please share. There's a plethora of 
memory technologies out there now that I admit I haven't been keeping tabs 
on. I - rightly or wrongly - have been taking the approach thus far that if 
I haven't come across them in my day-to-day work then they haven't yet made 
sufficient inroads into mainstream design...

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"