[Coco] CoCoUSB

[Allen Huffman]

Is there any interest in a CoCoUSB interface?

Modern Windows users are used plugging in almost anything and having it work, but if you ever use anything not mainstream (Chinese Arduino clones, BASIC Stamp programmers, etc.), you have to go search for drivers disks. I have had to go get all kinds of weird drivers to use various Made in China things, for instance.

If you use Linux or Mac, you already know there are tons of USB devices you just cannot use — no drivers exist. Only common basic things work (serial ports, etc.).

Once you step into micros (even the Raspberry Pi), you know there are tons of USB things you simply cannot use. Or, if you can use them, you have to install special software to use them.

On the CoCo, there are now incredibly low-cost chips that handle all the USB stuff and spit it out in a format that the CoCo could handle, or plug in to the upcoming Ed Snider MPI UART connections.

Instead of loading drivers, firmware can be loaded on the part to make it handle keyboards, or mice, or joysticks, or USB thumb drives, etc.

While it “could” be possible to plug in and have it detect and dynamically load firmware for the device, this would be much more expensive, and it might take 10 minutes to do this. Instead, the drivers would be pre-loaded (remember CONFIG.SYS in MS-DOS?) to define what the port handles.

It would be easy to add support to iItrOS-9, but RS-DOS would require patching (and as we know, any time you patch BASIC, you break things, since many programs go out and read hardware directly rather than using ROM calls). Think of it like the hard drive BASICs — you can make simple basic disk I/O work, but much assembly stuff wouldn’t work with it.

However, dedicated “USB joystick to CoC joystick port” and “USB keyboard to CoCo keyboard connector” boards could be done to embed inside the CoCo, which would be 100% compatible.

Asking for a friend.

		— A