[Coco] COCO FPGA

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:39 PM, Tony Cappellini <cappy2112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:35:38 -0600
> From: Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] COCO FPGA
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Message-ID: <20111222173538.GD25881 at warlock.deepthought.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
>>>With a good way of storing and accessing a bunch of rom packs from the
> flash
>>>rom on the fpgacoco3 there's little need for an expansion port or mpi.
>
> Rompacks aren't the only thing people plug into the expansion slot, right?
> The SuperIDE controller comes to mind, not to mention the No-Halt floppy
> controller from Tony DiStefano.
> I used to have the BurkN-Burke adapter, as well as Disto's 2MB Ram Disk
> cartridge.
>

The expansion slot has come up a couple times, but usually its comes
down to a lot of work for very little gain.
As for disk controllers, you have an SD card slot built into the DE1
board.  This isn't supported at the moment, but I believe it will be
soon.
You have high speed drivewire available right now (faster than many
Pak based controllers).
For RAM, there is 8MB DRAM on the board, but again it isn't supported
at this time AFAIK.
For sound paks, there is audio hardware on the board, and an Orchestra
90 is implemented already.
For games/software, you already have many slots built in.

Basically, it seems there is a way to do anything one did with the
expansion pak right on the board, it's just a matter of implementing
the FPGA code.  Since supporting a real expansion pak would mean some
complex electrical level conversions and other stuff I really don't
understand, and would mean having to slow down the FPGA CoCo to 2Mhz
talk to the original hardware, it isn't an appealing target.