[Coco] Mark McDougall's CoCo 1/2 FPGA Project

[Dave Philipsen]

On 11/14/2017 8:19 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> On 15/11/2017 11:50 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>
>> The EP2C5 eBay boards only have about 14.5K of internal block RAM. If 
>> you disassembled both the CB and ECB ROMs and then re-assembled 
>> eliminating some stuff you don't need you *might* get them to fit but 
>> then you would have no memory for font tables or anything else.
>
> Without external RAM you won't get close to running any sort of Coco 
> emulation on a 2C5.
>
> There's also no video...
>
>> I don't know what the requirements are for Pace. 
>
> The default configuration is to load the ROMs (including HDBDOS) into 
> on-chip RAM and use external (S)RAM to emulate the Coco DRAM.
>
> Also without any storage you're stuck without any means to load/save 
> programs, so pretty useless, unless you somehow rig up a Drivewire 
> server.
>
> The EP3C16 board o the waveshare site has (just) enough block RAM but 
> again - no video, no storage.
>

Yes, just like the eBay EP2C5 boards they are just basic FPGA cores with 
no extra stuff.  Fairly easy to add RAM, VGA, keyboard, serial port, 
though.  If you look at the Multicomp project it's a good starting point.


Dave


> Regards,
>