[Coco] The Tri-Annual CoCo 4 Thread

[Michael Robinson]

The COCO 3 failed commercially because of an engineering problem if I'm
not mistaken.  The mistake made the COCO 3 too costly for Tandy.  A COCO
4 needs to get around that engineering issue to be a viable and
successful machine.

The biggest problem I see for the COCO, information on how to program
them is being lost.  Another concern, didn't Radio Shack destroy the
COCO 3 blueprints a long time ago?

Products that seem to be non existent that are badly needed are kindle
editions of programming extended color basic.  People will probably want
to program in assembly, Pascal, C, C++, etcetera on a COCO 4 as well.

Color computer disk drives are becoming rare and old 5 1/4" floppy disks
aren't the most reliable anyways, yet outfits like Cloud 9 still insist
on people having a disk drive.

The color computer was the people's computer and compared to the IBM XT
and early IBM AT, easier to program.  The assembly language of the COCO
is more popular I understand than the assembly language used by XT's and
IA32 machines.

A COCO 4 should in theory run: Linux, Syllable, MenuetOS, and ReactOS.
This means 32 bit is a requirement and direct memory access hardware 
as well as memory protection hardware are a must.  The COCO 4 should
have a gigabyte of ram minimum and run at up to a gigaherz minimum.
In the era of multicore computing, one could embed the 6809 and the GIME
chip as a single core and add hardware support for emulation.  For that
matter, one could experiment with adding a Commodore core as well since 
the Commodore had excellent sprite support.  In addition to a single 8
bit ISA style expansion port, a 32 bit COCO 4 should probably have 32
bit PCI slots, (though a slot that won't take standard PCI cards is
probably in order).  Things that were primitive or non existent on the
COCO 3: multi channel surround sound, sprites, direct memory access, a
multi port expansion bus with a sophisticated interrupt system...  A
COCO 4 needs to be able to slow down to COCO 3 speeds.  For downward
compatibility, support for coco 3 compatible rom paks is needed.  The
biggest challenge is going to be developing the OS for a COCO 4.