[Coco] The Tri-Annual CoCo 4 Thread

[Mark McDougall]

On 10/02/2014 3:10 AM, Steve Batson wrote:

> I'm still amazed at the amount of disagreement that continues to go with
> these CoCo Replacments and The CoCo 4, CoCo X, Super CoCo or whatever you
> want to call it.

I'm not. Not in the slightest.

> Seriously, how many newbies do you think you can attract if you can't
> provide a somewhat simple out of the box option for any of these new
> creations?

You won't. It's not going to happen. This project is not for newbies. It's 
for Coco enthusiasts, to enhance their enjoyment and make things easier with 
connection to modern peripherals and putting the entire Coco software 
library at their fingertips. If you think a 6809-based computer is going to 
compete in this day-and-age against modern offerings, you need to remove 
those rose-coloured glasses.

And you simply will not get any sort of consensus here. Regardless of how 
considered, rational and 'common sense' your proposal is, it's simply not 
going to please everyone. I have absolutely ZERO interest in a Raspberry Pi 
solution, or any other software solution. And that really doesn't matter 
either, because there's just as many people that would be happy with it, 
even though secretly I know my solution is "The Best". ;)

Design by committee never works, and it won't here. What is going to work is 
a *number* of people actually building something, and sharing the design, 
and others can choose what they like and adopt it (Gary's Coco3FPGA is the 
perfect example). Hopefully we'll end up with (at least) a hardware 
solution, an embedded software solution, and a PC-based emulator solution.

IMHO the kind of consensus that we should be aiming for, are the 
specifications of any 'Coco4' enhancements. Standardise on, say, specific 
enhanced graphics modes, and then support them across all manner of 
implementations. That way there's (hopefully) enough users to promote 
software development utilising those enhancements.

And by all means throw your suggestions around; that's the fun of this hobby 
and you shouldn't be denied that. But please don't get surprised or 
disheartened by it all.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"