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

[Didier Derny]

frankly a real machine is magic, even if some missing part has been 
replaced by a fpga or a cpld
an emulator is just an emulator, the magic has disappeared... (even many 
emulator are really nice)


On 06/08/2015 13:30, Francis Swygert wrote:
> I've proposed something similar, and others have also. Remember Steve Bjork's proposal of a regular PC with a card that had the CoCo ports on it? A mini desktop would work as you propose now, just minus the CoCo specific ports -- though they could be emulated to a point as well. I've proposed programming the Centronics parallel port to at least partially emulate a cartridge port.
>
> The small board is appealing, could be mounted in a CoCo case with a compact USB keyboard. It has an Arduino bus also, so plug a VGA into the mini PCI and make a shield to emulate a cartridge port and joy sticks. I'm with you on the cartridge port -- emulate the accessories that plug in and be done with it. That excludes the machine for some experimentation though -- so use a parallel port card in a PC or create an I/O shield that partially emulates the cart port or at least acts like a PIA (or two) so it can be easily programmed to "run things".
>
>
> =====================================================
> Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 12:28:57 -0400From: Barry Nelson <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com>
>
> 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. Frank Swygert
> Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
> 803-604-6548
>