[Coco] Raspberry Pi and RS-232 ports

[Dave Philipsen]

I think, actually, that someone has already emulated a CoCo on a 
Raspberry Pi.  I've seen it mentioned here and there.  But someone 
pointed out some days ago that a Raspberry Pi takes a finite amount of 
time to boot and there's nothing like a good ol' CoCo that starts up 
pretty much immediately.  I brought up the idea that if a Rasperry Pi 
was only going to emulate a CoCo and nothing else it could surely be 
made to boot up instantly just like a CoCo.  After all, it has a CPU 
that runs at a clock speed of several hundred megahertz!  But I was 
speaking only theoretically.  I imagine it would be a herculean software 
effort to get in to the internals of the Pi and figure out how to get it 
to boot up and run as a CoCo without the aid of the Linux (or other) 
operating system.  It's certainly possible but it doesn't seem like it 
would be worth the effort just to save the 15 seconds or so required to 
boot into Linux and then run a CoCo emulator.

Dave


On 3/31/2017 12:51 PM, John Guin wrote:
> I remember a conversation here about getting serial IO working with a Pi emulating a coco.
>
> It seems there are already a few solutions possible for this:
> Roll your own:
> http://www.davidhunt.ie/add-a-9-pin-serial-port-to-your-raspberry-pi-in-10-minutes/
>
> and a prebuilt hat (there are likely many others):
> https://vetco.net/products/raspberry-pi-serial-rs232-hat
>
> On the same subject, has anyone made progress on booting a Pi to Coco?  I lost track of where this was,
> John
>
>