History & Philosophy
In the early 90's several
attempts at a CoCo 4 were made the MM/1 and the Tomcat being among the
most notable no more then a few hundred ever sold they had many good
points but also many issues when it came to backwards compatibility with
the CoCo 3 and eventually in the 2000's with FPGA becoming more powerful a
second wave of "CoCo 4 's " appeared I'm talking about you MISTER MATCHBOX
but many of the same problems continued.
Around 1994 I had a
concept of how a CoCo4 should be I think it was partly inspired by the
idea of having multiple TC9's in a Tomcat and later by Sock Masters idea
The main problems I had with many of these
designs was lack of comparability and lack of a Cartridge Slot I also felt
that I liked the computer in a keyboard design of the CoCo3 while wishing
that more expand ability was possible without resorting to that Big Ugly
Monstrosity canned the Multipack.
My general Idea consisted three 6309's
packaged such that two could act separately as two independent coco's or
together to be more powerfully with independent but synchronized clocks
that could run at coco2, coco3, 2x or 4x rate up to 7.152
MHz. These CPU's would have a cooling fan above them and a third
6309 cpu would focus on controlling the hardware allocation.
This hardware would consist of all the same
ports that the coco 3 had except for RF out which would be droped most of
these would be enhanced the joysticks would be 8 bit rather then 6 bit the
Bit Banger would have a few extra control lines to use with a special
cable but be able to use standard coco bit banger cables as well. The
Cassette tape port would be improved and have a 3000 baud or maybe even
6000 baud mode and the ability to be used as an audio digitizer. The
Composite out would be the same RCA port but the quality of the signal
would be better the audio out RCA port would be replaced with a Stereo
Jack and the RGB port would remain unchanged.
The missing RF Modulator would be replaced
with VGA out and other changes would include Dual Midi Ports and the Internal Power
Supply would be replaced by a Molex connector so that standard PC
hard disk power adapters would work as external power supplys.
The system would come with 4M of RAM and
include a 160K Battery Backed RAM disk and a 8K Battery Backed Keyboard
Macro Memory using three C batteries for when the system not plugged into
AC. And an 8K Settings Memory powered of a long life button battery,
The Graphics capabilities would
include at least 512 native colors and the ability to flicker quickly
between two screens. Color Screens would be capable of at least 450x720
and a monochrome or grey scale screen would be capable of displaying 60 rows of
a 132 column wide screen at 1056x720 or at least 924x720 resolution.
The Concept in Block Diagram format would
be:
The memory layout would be like this:
Mother board layout something like this:
In any case this idea changed over the
years,
As it seemed unlikely that anyone would
attempt a Multiple CPU coco anytime soon my Coco 4 ideas got scaled back
and the original coco 4 concept renamed CoCo5.
As time went on I came up with some
philosophy for how an advanced coco should work.
- Maximum backwards compatibility
- Usable out of the box with NO other attachments hence my inclusion
of the 160K built in memory disk.
- Classic Style should stay very much like the coco 3 an
attractive computer in a keyboard one of my faves.
My other faves were the Amiga 600 and 1200 and the
Atari XE and ST series computers
I thought the Vic20-C64-128 style ugly and the Amiga 500 much better
then the C64 but still just so-so. (A mater of taste
ascetics are to each his own.)
Also as much as I liked the default style of the coco
adding the Multi-Pak to it turned it into one of the Ugliest
systems out there.
Hence the idea of a build in "Virtual Multi-Pak.
- Keep It Internet Independent
This was definitely not part of my original idea which
had included a Cassette tape based web browser
called "CoCoMo" Imagined as a version of the Mosaic Browser and
the Beach Boys Song*
But now I think keeping the coco internet
independent is the better Idea as keeping up with security patches
would be a tread mill.
- Something that will encourage developers and tinkers to build
addons for hence my insistence on the cartridge port.
Well that's about all I can think about now.