[Coco] DE1 vs Raspberry PI

[Francis Swygert]

Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2015 01:00:10 -0400
From: "Richard E. Crislip" <rcrislip at neo.rr.com>

Hi Mark, Gustavo, Theodore, Aaron, and Steve,

Thank all of you for informing me of the differences. The Pi is an apple
and the DE1 is an Orange 8-). Wish I had an older DE1 8_(. I have a PI
that I will have be content to play Linux on I guess. If anyone has or
knows of an older DE1 they would be willing to part with or is
available, I'm interested. TIA===========================================
Why be content? The thing about an emulator is that you can play with an emulated CoCo at any time and on just about any platform. Chris Hawks has a blog or website (forget which) with "instructions" as to how he got one of the emulators running under Linux on a Pi. You could whittle Linux down to only what the emulator needs and use a small SSD and have it all boot up like a CoCo in a short time. It does take some boot time, but with everything whittled down and using an SSD that would be minimal. If all you're doing is using it as a CoCo (use a script to have it boot up then run the emulator) a small SSD would run everything and serve as storage. An 8GB SSD is as little as $20 at NewEgg, though you may need an SATA to IDE adapter (another $10-20). That's enough to run Linux, the emulator, and have enough to store a lot of CoCo software left over. 

The Pi isn't the best thing to use though. Many use it because it's small and cheap. A little desktop computer or a mini ITX board would be faster and more capable, but of course cost more. An ECS Liva X is $120 at NewEgg and would be a great little box for an emulator. Older laptops work well too. Anything with a dual core processor will be plenty fast. If I were to use a Pi I'd get the Pi2 with the quad core processor. 
 Frank Swygert
 Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
 803-604-6548