[Coco] The Tri-Annual CoCo 4 Thread

[Mark McDougall]

On 13/02/2014 12:55 PM, Michael Robinson wrote:

> Explain to me how a faster modern 6309/6809 successor can be built
> without introducing: direct memory access, interrupts, memory protection
> hardware, etcetera?  For a COCO 4 to be popular, really popular, it has
> to compete with Playstation 3, Wii U, and XBOX.  

Woah! Hold on. Who said *anything* at all about a Coco4 competing with PS3
& XBOX??? That's just crazy talk. You do realise that in order to compete
with these systems, you're looking at whole teams of professional hardware
and software engineers, and multi-million dollar investment - right!?! Not
to mention you "require" support of some weird and wacky OS's that
probably have a user base no bigger than the Coco itself...

I think you're very much misconstrued the whole 'Coco4' project
discussions and what we're trying to achieve here (not to mention what can
realistically be achieved). You're talking about real pie-in-the-sky
stuff, IMHO of little value to anyone with even an interest in the Coco,
and has been re-iterated, basically a PC.

> My older brother who is an electrical engineer says the COCO3 can be
> cloned easily using Xylinx or Microchip or Texas Instruments processors.

I'm really not sure what this statement has to do with the specifications
you throw about. It's also old news, and has also been done before. And,
FTR, I *am* an electronics design engineer; one that has worked on designs
for modern intel base-boards and PCI & PCIe boards so you might say I know
a little about modern computer design too...

Regards,

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