[Coco] DECB -> Pi2/3

[James Ross]

Hey Gene, thanks for the reply. I always enjoy reading your messages here on the list. You have a unique way expressing yourself in writing that is enjoyable to read.  I do try and stay up w/ list even though I don't post much on here, mainly on Facebook.

Gene Heskett wrote:
> ... <snip> ...
> But those are the I/O choices on the pi's. USB, write your own GPIO 
> stuff, or build an fpga card that talks spi. The latter will give you 
> access to all the power of that quad core, 1.2 GHz clocked arm A53 
> processor.  

I’d love to spend time learning the low-level I/O and other capabilities of the Pi … 

> And the ability to do most anything such as running nitros9 
> at a higher speed than it can run natively on the coco3 ...

I’ve thought about this too.  Not sure this is exactly what you’re referring to, but it would be quite neat to see NitrOS9 ported to native ARM machine code on the Pi.  No 64k restriction – full address space / running at full speed using multiple cores … very, very lean.  Very quick boot. No Linux bloat. <- not that I am dissing Linux, however!!! :) 

> ...   And thats just the starting target. Much 
> like the original coco, your imagination is the limit of what you can 
> do. And do it at 20% of the original coco's $400 for a 4k memory 

Absolutely! And you’re not even taking into account inflation!   

James