[Coco] MCC-216

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 1, 2013, at 2:05 PM, J.P. Samson <coco+list at jeanpaulsamson.com> wrote:
> The big question mark for me is the inability to attach external devices.  From my point of view, support for some kind of analog joystick/mouse is essential (be it the pot-based original CoCo joysticks or something else).  A serial port of some kind would also be critical for Drivewire users, I should think.

An add-on I/O card that provided the standard CoCo ports (joystick, serial) would be nice, and even nicer if there was a way to add a cartridge port. But, most of the cartridge port stuff can be emulated. At this stage, I don't think we really "want" a true 5 1/4" floppy once we have our disks turned in to images -- we just want to be able to access them 100% like a floppy. Ditto on hard drives. I don't want to have a physical hard drive ever again on a CoCo, when I can use cheap and fast SD cards and clone/back them up to my Mac.

But, when it comes to interacting with a device, having a true CoCo joystick or even a real CoCo keyboard is needed to make it feel remotely like a CoCo. It would be trivial to use a Teensy 2.0 ($16-$19) and cable to read a physical CoCO keyboard and spit out USB signals for each keypress. So, one could take a dead CoCo, remove the motherboard, and add this circuit and then use a "real" feeling CoCo hooked to a PC/Mac/Linux emulator. Same thing for this FPGA device.

> If, as someone else has pointed out, the Altera DE-1 boards are being deprecated, it would be nice if some current FPGA implementation would be supported, be that the MCC-216 or something else.

Are these all production devices that one can just go and buy an receive in a few days?

		-- Allen