[Coco] The Tri-Annual CoCo 4 Thread

[iggybeans at comcast.net]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 13:11:20 -0700 
<farna at amc-mag.com> wrote: 

>THAT is exactly my conclusion! If you build it they will come. Trying 
>to get a consensus my not be a bad idea, but do it from the archives of 
>previous discussions, do not let the community know you are doing it 
>and then spring it on them when it is a finished viable product in what 
>ever form it is. My thoughts, yours will probably vary ;-). 

>Case in point: The MM/1 was designed "by committee", with the designer 
t>trying to please as many people as possible. He brought a number of people 
>into the discussion as the machine was being designed. It ended up costing 
>a lot more than expected and having too many issues/compromises to be very 
>well received. It also took well over a year just to get the first ones 
>out. 

>Frank Hogg listened to the discussions around the MM/1 and CoCo community 
>in general, then proceeded to design and build the TC-9 "Tomcat" with no 
>(or little) external help. While it was no more of a success than the 
>MM/1, it did come out first. It too had too many compromises. In the end 
>both were pretty good OS-9 machines but had no backwards compatibility 
>with the CoCo outside of OS-9. The Tomcat was supposed to have a 
>hardware/software compatibility mode, but as I recall (and I could be 
>wrong) it was never fully achieved. The Tomcat would run CoCo OS-9 
>software, but that was all. In that respect it was more compatible than 
>the MM/1, but not enough. I think the software required some patching to 
>run due to some of the hardware differences. 

>We're back to CC3 compatibility at a minimum. I think we can dispense with 
>CC1/2 compatibility at this point, as there are only a few useful programs 
>that won't run on the CC3. Enhancements are fine as long as there is 
>transparent CC3 compatibility as well. Supporting enhanced modes will 
>limit those programs to the new machines of course, but that should be 
>expected. Once a standard is set and a couple programs using the 
>enhancements appear (even if just games), then interest in the enhanced 
>version will grow. 

>Right now I'd like to see a two-pronged approach to best cover the current 
>(and future) market -- a hardware solution like the DE-1/FPGA along with 
>an emulated solution. Develop the FPGA version with compatibility and 
>enhancements, then alter one of the emulators to match the hardware. That 
>will solve the dilemma of cost and help both camps. Those who want the 
>look and feel of real hardware have it, and those who would be satisfied 
>with, prefer, or need (usually due to lack of space and/or funds) a 
>software solution will have it. Since new software will run equally well 
>on both the user base is increased dramatically, though probably still not 
>to a commercially viable level. Still, the larger the potential base the 
>better. 

If Frank had taken Ed Gressick's offer to help port G-Windows to his systems we would have had a common GUI across all NG platforms. 
That combined with Frank's 8 bit efforts and our planned 6809/GIME expansion board would have made the 68K based hardware more attractive to the legacy users. 

Now, ideally, we are going to have to consider something like an FPGA based expansion board for 32bit/64bit systems that allows Coco software to be run in a Window.