[Coco] How about THIS as a CoCo 3 replacement instead of an FPGA? Thoughts?

[Steve Batson]

I like the idea of emulating the Coco on smaller devices because they could be wired into anything we want. Jeff's emulators are great to a point, he has done some fantastic work and knows his stuff. I don't think he is supporting his emulators for the CoCo anymore. I purchased his CoCo 3 emulator directly from him when he was selling it after it first came out. I found that it works great with most CoCo 2 software but there were some CoCo 3 games that used features of the GIME that were very slow. It's been a long time since I did that so I really don't remember which games had the issue. I contacted him and he told me that there were some issues with his GIME emulation that could cause performance issues in some cases. I don't know if he ever fixed that or not.

Personally, I Love VCC and it works great for most everything I've tried on it and is easy to setup, configure and manage. 

I think Emulators are great and they fascinate me. I mostly use the CoCo for games, so I can do most of that on the computer in an emulator. I think using and emulator in place of an FPGA to try to replace hardware wouldn't be ideal because you don't have the ports and cartridge slot. For me, this is really not a big deal. For others that have tons of program packs and other stuff the need the ports, it could be a problem. I do have and a real CoCo 3 and some 2s which I use as well.

Regardless, it would be nice to see a 100% compatible board replacement for the CoCo 3 with ports and Cartridge slot in case the board dies. Will this happen? I don't know. Is it feasible? I don't know that either. With emulators, hardware is so powerful these days, they can be run from tiny cards to full blown computers. Other than the fun and wow factor of putting one on a small system like the Rasberry Pi or Arduino, in most cases I'd rather just run on my main system.


      From: Barry Nelson <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com>
 To: coco at maltedmedia.com 
 Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2015 9:28 AM
 Subject: [Coco] How about THIS as a CoCo 3 replacement instead of an FPGA? Thoughts?
   
How about an Arduino Galileo (intel based Arduino) running Free DOS and booting into Jeff Vavasour's old CoCo 3 emulator?

http://www.mouser.com/catalog/specsheets/Galileo_Datasheet_329681_003.pdf

http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.html#coco3

FreeDOS running on Galileo using SeaBIOS as a CSM (Compatibility Support Module).
 
The SeaBIOS patches are at http://git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/seabios.git and patches to the Quark UEFI at http://git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/quark-edk2.git

It has a mini pci express slot which can have a VGA card plugged into it.

A full sized mini-PCI Express* slot, 100Mb Ethernet port, Micro-SD slot, RS-232 serial port, USB Host port, USB Client port, and 8MByte NOR flash come standard on the board.

o 512 KByte embedded SRAM that is enabled by the firmware by default. 

o 256 MByte DRAM, enabled by the firmware by default.

o Optional micro SD card offers up to 32GByte of storage
o USB storage works with any USB 2.0 compatible drive

o 11 KByte EEPROM can be programmed via the EEPROM library.

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