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

[Dave Philipsen]

On 2/8/2017 6:09 AM, Francis Swygert wrote:
> 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,
Few advantages?  Try 25 MHz and a new 640 x 450 256-color graphics mode 
for starters (there are more).  You won't get either of those with a 
'real' CoCo 3.  I suppose it comes down to personal preference and 
whether you just want to stay stuck with the status quo of 1986.  At 
least the CoCo3FPGA gives a high degree of backward compatibility with a 
real CoCo 3 while giving the opportunity to explore and use some new 
features.

And, by the way, the DE2 is not a 'currently produced' development 
board.  It has been discontinued by Terasic although both the DE1 and 
the DE2 are readily available on the used market.  I just sold a DE2 to 
a gentleman for $120 and I have sold DE1s for $90. Currently, the 
implementation on the DE2 is no different than on the DE1 so there would 
be no immediate benefit unless you plan on doing some additional 
development that would make use of a certain feature that the DE2 has 
but the DE1 does not.

Dave


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