[Coco] The Coco3FPGA - Bringing the Color Computer 3 into the new Millenium!

[Francis Swygert]

The only issue with the CoCo FPGA is the relatively high cost. It's $250-300 (with the expansion board), and no case, PS, keyboard, etc. Of course those don't add much to cost. There are a few advantages over a real CoCo3, but you can get a CoCo3 setup for about the same, many times cheaper. Getting it on the currently produced DE2 will be a help though. The site posted has DE-1s available for $150 though...Terasic - DE Main Boards - Cyclone - Altera DE1 Board
  
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Terasic - DE Main Boards - Cyclone - Altera DE1 Board
 By Terasic Technologies - Cyclone II EP2C20F484 with ~20,000 LEs - 8MB SDRAM, 512K SRAM, and 4MB Flash - Audio/Video interface, RS232,...  |   |

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 The emulated version is more a complementary item than a competitor. I would like to see a canned version on an SD card that boots off the card right into CoCo mode... or a menu that has the different CoCo models to select before booting. A Live version on SD card would function at a reasonable speed on most modern computers, might need to directly install on an old system. 

The only thing I'd really like to see is parallel development of the two as far as any enhanced capabilities. I could see the hardware FPGA version taking the lead here, as there are more limitations in hardware than in emulation. I think you can emulate just about any enhanced feature you can think of, as long as it's in the capabilities of a modern computer. Might need a newish computer to do it is all. Enhanced features on one that aren't on the other will cause a split in software, something a small community doesn't need. 


Frank Swygert
 Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
 803-604-6548