[Coco] COCO FPGA

Fri Dec 23 21:13:46 EST 2011

I have to agree .  I soon want to get rid of floppy drives and 
everything connected to the coco.
Two years ago, before my medical problems, I copied about 800 floppies 
to the hard drive on my PC
and backed up the folders to a 16GB thumb drive.  I threw away the 
floppies and gave to Good Willl
the 16 Tandy flip top boxes that held them.

I started with a Coco I in 1980, and have had at one time or for a long 
period of time just about every upgrade you could get for it, including 
getting several Coco II's and several Coco III's.  I have had an 
Atomtronics add on board
that I ran FLex on, I had a Burke and Burke controller connected to 20 
MB seagate Hard drives and also
a Cloud 9  TC3 Scsi controller.  For a time I had a Nocan3 board 
attached to a Coco III with 8 MB of memory
that it could access.  I never got into OS9 until recently so I never 
did much with it.  I have in the past had
Speech cards and Orchestra 90 cards.

I used the Coco to drive midi keyboards and used Lyra and Jukebox.

I have always had a good interest in what this tiny 8-bit machine could 
be made to do.  I would very much like to see this tiny 8-bit power 
preserved in this overwhelming technology that exists today.  I want to 
see its power of
programming kept intact but embrace the technology that exists today.  I 
don't want to see the years of baggage
that it aquired over the last thirty years preserved along with it.

The more simple a replacement board ( FPGA  ) can be made that will 
connect to the current technology the
better I think it will be.  I don't want to connect power hungry noisy 
floppy drives to it.  I don't want to plug
bulky clumsy cards into it.  I don't want to hook up no so good monitor 
to it.  If it has flash rom that will replace cartridges , has a slot 
for for a tiny camera size SDHC card into to store files on, a serial 
port to connect devices
like the bitbanger, and has a VGA port to connect to a current LCD 
monitor and will run drivewire to connect
to a PC, it will have everything I could have ever dreamed a replacement 
for the coco would have.

I think that Drivewire is absolutely the best software that has ever 
come along for the coco in its entire history.
I know first hand that Drivewire will go well into the future.
I have Drivewire4 installed as an App in the UI of Windows 8 Ultimate 64 
bit PR.  If you have a touch screen type monitor in the summer of 2012 
when Windows 8 is designed to be released, all you will have to do is 
touch the App
for DW4 on the monitor and it will open up active on the desktop.  It is 
working 100% right now on the Windows 8 PR.

As soon as the CCoco3 FPGA is released for sale by someone, I will be 
one of the first in line to get one.  I am hoping that all one will have 
to do is connect it to the PC, connect a monitor  a Joystick , a power 
supply and a PC type keyboard and download the roms and drivewire right 
into it.

Thats my take on it

On 12/23/2011 11:05 AM, Frank Pittel wrote:
> My understanding is that work is being done to allow access to the SD card on the
> altera de1 board with coco3fpga. In my case I've been using drivewire with my
> physical coco for a long time and am doing what I can to move away from physical
> floppies as fast as I can. As a result I never considered needing to connect to a
> physical machine as a limitation.
>
> The Other Frank
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:23:46AM -0500, Frank Swygert wrote:
>> I agree, but this means that another computer must be used with the CoCo3FPGA for any storage. That makes it a bit less desirable as a CoCo replacement, but since the CoCo can't connect directly to the internet I suppose another computer will always be necessary to some degree. I think it is still imperative that the computer be able to function without another computer. Emulating floppy and/or hard discs with the SD card slot is probably the best way to do that -- just not currently implemented. Maybe going through Drivewire (since that's built in, I think) to the SD card would be possible? Is there a way to detect when an SD card is present? I'm not familiar enough with SD card electronics to know. Would be nice if Drivewire could be programmed to look to the SD card when present instead of the serial port.
>>
>> Hmmm.... how hard would it be to make a small stand-alone board that could access an SD card and plug into the serial port? Could that be done cheaply enough with something like an Arduino? It would have to run a version of DW in order to work, so that would have to be ported/written, but that might be the easiest to implement stand-alone storage. Then one could plug into the SD card box or a regular computer. Or could something like this be programmed into the FPGA on the DE-1 board and use the SD slot already there??
>>
>> --------------------
>> Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:00:31 -0600
>> From: Frank Pittel<fwp at deepthought.com>
>>
>> The coco3fpga connects to a computer via drivewire so things like the
>> SuperIDE, and other floppy controllers aren't of much use.
>>
>> -- 
>> Frank Swygert
>> Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
>> Magazine (AMC)
>> For all AMC enthusiasts
>> http://www.amc-mag.com
>> (free download available!)
>>
>>
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>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
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