[Coco] My DE-1 project just took a leep forward!

[Nick Marentes]

On 24/10/2015 4:59 AM, tim franklinlabs.com wrote:
>     With very little time to work on my SoCoCo project I had another
>     breakthrough today. Thanks to Zippsters suggestion with a cheap digital
>     analyzer, I was able to solve my video problem. My 6809 core now runs
>     completely under the DE-1's 8 meg of SDRAM with the video using the 512
>     meg of SRAM. Again, the CPU speed is limited to about 1.2MHz but I plan
>     on getting that faster in the future. The limiting factor is the access
>     timing on the SDRAM. Now I can focus my energy to getting the
>     "modified" CoCo Basic running.
>
>     It's not my intention to make this backward compatible. That's being
>     done very well by Gary Beckers project. I'm looking at creating a "NEW"
>     Coco with the features I want. I still want it to be able to run many
>     BASIC programs now available with some backward compatibility but I'm
>     more interested in new CoCo-Concepts!!
>
>     Features I'm planning on putting in:
>
>     - SD disk usage within the BASIC platform
>     - 80 (and possibly 132) column text similar to the VGA standard
>     - 800x600x4096 colors
>     - Yamaha DX7 sound engine (open source code already exists)
>     - Bitter/Blitter and Sprite engine
>
>     -Tim
>
>


May be a good time to also consider WHO is going to write software that 
will showcase and use these features considering how little is written 
for the existing CoCo's.

I don't want to sound negative and I'm all for new hardware but this is 
a very relevant question with now 4 people developing FPGA CoCo's.

Nick