Earlier this year, I bought a MiSTer setup through Roger Taylor. MiSTer is an FPGA platform that can run recreations of consoles (Atari, Sega, Nintento, etc.), arcade games, and home computers (Apple, Commodore, etc.). Roger’s Matchbox CoCo FPGA project has been ported to it.
Here is the new Facebook group that covers all the various FPGA platforms Roger is working on:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/realcoco
Here is the MiSTer Wiki project page:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
Here is Roger Taylor’s site:
I just unboxed mine and hooked it up the other night, and I am quite impressed. Being able to act as a virtualized hardware CoCo 3 as well as all the other machines is a game changer. Software emulators like MAME already let you do that, and I hope to do some comparisons between my Raspberry Pi emulator machine and this FPGA device.
And I still need to pick up a few more of the FPGA devices that can run the CoCo…
Hi Al. I know I’ve looked into this product before but I can’t remember, does it come prebuilt and configured when you buy it or is there a good amount of work you still need to put into it to get it set up as a Coco?
This sounds like a really good product for a lapsed Coco user like myself who would love to recreate the environment without using a ton of workspace (or spending a ton of cash reaquiring everything).
Mine is two boards and a 3D printed enclosure. I downloaded and extracted an image to microSD then used a USB on the Go hub to connect a keyboard an mouse. By hooking it to Ethernet, it can boot and self update. I had to download the CoCo core and FTP the file to the unit (or I could have swapped the SD and copied it). Plus any Dsk images and such I want.
But initially I got mine from Roger Taylor and it was already set up. Even generic it was way easier than getting a Raspberry Pi going, though the CoCoPi project has a turnkey image that makes the Pi a CoCo real easy.