[Coco] Considering new HD6309E based board

[Al Hartman]

I think a mistake that a lot of systems make is that they give no thought to 
casing.

If I had the knowledge to design a system, I'd have the following baselines:

1. Use a form factor for the mother board that will fit a commercially 
available case.

Like this, for example: http://www.antec.com/product.php?id=2239&pid=6

2. Either use an easily sourceable power supply, or use the power supply 
that fits the case so you have extra connectors for a hard drive, optical 
drive, or just an IDE-to-CF adapter. Gie yourself flexibility where the cost 
isn't great.

Always keep in mind the short-sightedness of past designers who left 
lowercase out of the CoCo, TRS-80 Model I, and Apple ][. Or, who said, "64k 
will be enough for anyone."

3. Have VGA video as a lowest common denominator. You could do HDMI if you 
wanted.

4. You are going to need USB for mice and keyboards. Either use a USB Key 
for initial loading and boot, or put a CF-Card holder on the board. Like the 
MiniMIG or others.

5. If possible, make your memory use an SO-DIMM rather than chips on the 
board. Setup the connector/system so that a firmware update might allow more 
than 512k of RAM. I have a nice P4 notebook where they by design, limited 
the RAM to 1gb. Because 256mb modules were the best they had. 512mb were on 
the horizon. But, they didn't figure that 1 or 2gb modules would someday be 
available and inexpensive.


I think a capable 6309 NitrOS9 system would be popular among the NitrOS9 
crowd. And, someone might write a CoCo Simulator to run on it someday.

-[ Al ]-