[Coco] MCC-216

[Bill Pierce]

Allen,
It seems to me, that what you are wanting... is another Coco. Cloud 9 sells them.
The old hardware is just that... old. I'm not saying it's not valid... just old. Meaning it will never be made again. Those disks you have in a box? If I was you, I would start copying them by any means you can NOW. The longer you wait, the fewer of them you'll copy. No, it's not the drives that will be the problem. For now, they can be repaired. It's the disks themselves. I have about 250-300 disks and when I started to go through them this year, the coating started peeling off !! These disks have a physical life and have gone well past their limit. I know there's people that have disks that are reading fine for now but that's not going to last. The nature of how these disks are made make them vulnerable to all kinds of "dry rot". Out of nearly 300 disks, I was able to read about 40-50. I've talked to several others with the same problem. If you're able to read the disks, read them once to copy them to virtual format and put them back in a safe, dry place.

I feel the whole idea of creating a new Coco is not to exactly emulate the Coco we have.. I have several... why emulate them if not to make them better? But the idea is to take the Coco to new heights and expand the Coco to what it could have been had Tandy continued to carry the line. For now, the disk drives are the weakest link as they are failing, one by one. Drivewire was/is an excellent, cheap answer to this. In most cases, DW will run as is with no modification to the software. This is something everyone can afford, not just those with "toy budgets". Drivewire is not limited to serial. That's just what was convenient for those developing it at the time. Drivewire could be made to work in many ways, even from custom made hardware interfaces. The serial protocol was for the Coco's benefit.. Drivewire itself is not limited to this. It will accept data in most any way you want to send it, just give it a port to connect to.

 The next to go is the monitors. Roy's adapter has helped with this problem. But we need a cheaper solution to this. A "new" Coco would solve this with compatibility with modern monitors.

The joystick/mouse for the Coco was a joke to say the least. It was inadequate from the beginning. The resolution was less than the screen it operated on. The advent of the Coco 3 made it worse when they didn't address this problem. It was one of the biggest complaints when the Coco3 came out.

I too would like as much "backward compatibility" as possible but sacrifices have to be made just as we did with the Coco 3 that would not run all Coco 1/2 software. Yes, every circuit in the Coco could be hardware emulated (theoretically) and a Coco could be made. But I, for one, am not willing to pay the price that would entail to create such a monster and I feel most are of the same opinion.

Give me a machine that accepts an expanded 6809/6309 instruction set with at least 75-90% backwards compatibility, modern storage formats, USB or Firewire, 1024x768 or greater graphics, 256 or more colors, Internet access, modern keyboard, modern mouse, runs old software and NitrOS-9 and I'm happy.

This of course is just my opinion and subject to change as soon as someone releases something new... :-)
Bill P

Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Bill Pierce
ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Wed, Jan 2, 2013 7:06 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] MCC-216


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)
Sent from my MacBook.

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