[Coco] MCC-216

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 1, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
> There are game pads and joysticks available for the mcc-216. From what I can tell there's a usb port of some sort so we
> should be able to connect it to a pc for drivewire support. Then again with an SD card slot it might be better to have
> a drivewire type of server in the box using the SD card. I can get 16GB cards for less then $10. Imagine 16Gig of disk
> on a coco with no external drive connections. Personally if cartridges could be "installed" into the 2MB of flash I'd be
> happy to lose the slot.

DriveWire is great, but ideally we still need something with full compatibility. RGB-DOS/HDB-DOS/B&B etc. cannot work with all software. Emulation of an FD1773 (or whatever it is) floppy controller that then turns in to SD storage would still be best.

Another issue is how easy is it to clone copy protected discs. At this point, perhaps "everything" exists and has been cloned to disk images, but if I were to get such a virtual CoCo, I'd want to sit down and start feeding my huge boxes of 5 1/4" floppies in to the thing making my own images. True FD1773 could let me read my 42 track discs (I did that alot with patches to DECB and OS-9 to get more storage), 80 track discs, etc.

Other than potential mysteries inside the GIME (if there are any), hardware emulation of a CoCo via FPGA seems like the best best, but if it cannot use true CoCo hardware, it might as well be a small X86 box running MESS.

With the Commodore 64-on-a-chip product (the joystick), Atari 2600-on-a-chip product (Flashback 2) and various Nintendo-on-a-chip products, I wonder what approach they took to emulate full systems like that?
-
Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
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