[Coco] [!! SPAM] CoCoFest Online - For those that just simply could not go.

[John Kent]

I'm afraid I missed out on the live video link by Aaron. I did download 
a 300MB video from Curtis Boyle's ftp site but it was a fixed camera and 
didn't show any of the other tables there that I could see. I did skip 
through the video though. I've enjoyed seeing the videos on YouTube by 
Alan Huffman, they have been great, and I enjoyed seeing Gary's 
CoCo3FPGA demo from last year. I even get a mentioned :-). I hope there 
can be a video with edited highlights this year to see what is on display.

Living in Australia, it's a bit expensive to fly all the way to the US 
to take part. I was hoping to get an FPGA MC-10 going for this year's 
CoCo Fest, but I am involved with a number of local community 
organizations and activities which have taken a lot of my time.

I was going to comment on Roger Taylor's comments about the Super IDE 
and CF. I have implemented an IDE interface on some of my FPGA 6809 
projects. The CF cards I was using did have a feature register that 
allowed for 8 bit operation, but that was not present on most IDE hard 
disks. Instead I used a 16 bit interface which latched the high or low 
byte depending on whether you were doing a read or write. You could do 
the same on the CoCo using a pair of 74HC646 bus registers and a 74HC139 
or GAL for doing the address decoding and generating the bus register, 
clock, enable and direction signals.

I wrote disk drivers for Flex9. I wrote a small X-Modem download routine 
to program the CF card with a disk image. I think it was buffered, and 
maybe even interrupt driven using the MC6850 compatible RS232 interface 
so that the CF card had time to write the sector to flash memory. The CF 
cards that I was using might have been limited to a 22bit LBA or 2GB 
capacity using True IDE mode although ATA uses a 28 bit LBA which 
extends the capacity to 128GB. The lower 4 bits of the head register 
form the 4 Most Significant Bits of the LBA. True IDE must not have used 
all the cylinder bits if it uses a 22bit LBA.

John.

On 23/05/2011 7:48 PM, Nick Marentes wrote:
> After all the chat on the list about the difficulty in setting up IRC 
> and Webcam at the CoCoFest, we were let to believe that it was an 
> impossible task given the low bandwidth Wifi connection at the fest.
>
> In steps Aaron Wolfe and amazed us all !!
>
> Aaron had his laptop sending live video via the hotels Wifi via 
> Ustream for almost the full two days of the fest, kindly moving the 
> laptop periodically for the online viewers to experience some of the 
> fun of the Fest.
>
> We were able to watch live video in one window via ustream while 
> chatting to other people online and at the fest via IRC in another.
>
> Curtis Boyle has recorded a lot of the ustream feed and I believe will 
> have 2.5 hours available from his ftp site.
>
> I read several comments from people saying they wish they were there 
> which confirms my belief that the web access can actually HELP the 
> CoCoFest by encouraging people to attend the next fest.
>
> On behalf of all the online folks I'd like to thank Aaron for his 
> efforts and his kind support to his fellow CoCoNuts. You made us proud 
> to be part of the CoCo community.
>
> Thank you also to Tony Podraza of the Glenside group for allowing this 
> to happen.
>
> Nick Marentes
>
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>

-- 
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