The CoCo-Pi Project

The latest CoCo-Pi distribution (64bit) is now available for download and it’s still compatible with the RPi3 B+, RPi4 and RPi400. Most of what you see will be very familiar with the exception that some of the emulators, programs or other utilites will be newer and compiled for 64bit. MAME makes a return and is now up to date (including the recently released MAME 0.260). trs80gp was introduced to the CoCo-Pi project a little while back (thank you George and Peter). It’s a featured emulator now as it supports the CoCo 1/2 models as well as the MC-10.

For those of you doing software development, there are plenty of tools and resources available to you. I’ve updated the Build Menu in the geany editor. It currently supports the following:

Edit source code (BASIC, ASM, C) with (some) syntax highlighting.
Assemble ASM code (LWASM or asm6809)
Compile C code (CMOC for CoCo, CC6303 for MC-10)
Compile BASIC code for the CoCo 1/2/3 with ugBASIC
Compile BASIC code for the MC-10 with tasm6801/mcbasic
Build/populate DSK images and launch with your choice of MAME, XRoar or trs80gp
Build/populate C10/WAV files and launch with your choice of MAME, XRoar or trs80gp (MC-10 emulation)
Mount these same images with pyDriveWire and access them from your DriveWire connected real CoCo’s and/or MC-10’s.

MAME and trs80gp provide their own built-in debuggers. Debugging with Xroar is available as well using a combination of ddd and m6809-gdb. All of this is included and ready to use with CoCo-Pi.

As mentioned before, ugBasic is provided in CoCo-Pi along with the CROSS-LIB and DynoSprite development libraries.

Java based DriveWire makes a return to the CoCo-Pi (64bit now) thanks to Pedro Pena. While pyDriveWire remains the default, it’s good to have an additional option (if needed).

There are simply too many things to list here. I’ve been planning to do some new videos that will cover the features of CoCo-Pi. In the meantime, I still try to frequent the #coco-pi channel on Discord for any comments, questions, etc..

Download the latest SD card image here: https://coco-pi.com/downloads/

I’m sure there will be some issues, bugs, etc.. As before, I will try to address them as quickly as I can and provide updates using the built-in update feature in CoCo-Pi.

I can’t thank the authors/creators/maintainers of all the emulators, programs, tools, libraries, etc., enough for their contributions to the CoCo/Dragon/MC-10 community. As I’ve said many times, the CoCo-Pi project would not exist without their hard work. In addition, I’d like to acknowledge and thank all the video/podcast content creators that cover our community. A very big and sincere thank you to all of you.

Finally, I’ve been getting many inquiries about CoCo-Pi for the Raspberry Pi 5. No ETA on this as this new model is only just starting to become available in larger quantities. Beyond that, development / testing time will be needed and I don’t have one to work with yet. I don’t believe this latest 64bit image of CoCo-Pi will be compatible with the RPi5, but I’m sure those of you who might be getting an RPi5 will test and let me know. In the meantime, yes, it is on my radar.