The Radio Shack TRS-80 Colour Computer may never have achieved the sales volume of its competitors from Commodore or Apple, but it offered a surprisingly capable set of hardware. There were three versions, with the final one being a significant upgrade in many ways. There was no upgrade path for owners of version 1 and 2 machines to have a version 3 back in the day, but now thanks to [Felipe Antoniosi] such an upgrade is possible. How? With a Tang Nano 20K FPGA board, of course!

The CoCo 3 had a paged memory system for expansion up to 512k, as well as a significantly more capable graphics chip which while compatible with the original Motorola part offered enhanced graphics. The upgrade emulates these, and connects to the CoCo via a set of daughter boards that connect to where the various motherboard chips sat. it offers an HDMI output as well as analog video and enhanced sound capability, bringing the machine firmly into the 21st century.

As mods go to classic hardware, this is quite an invasive one. Whether or not you’d prefer to do this to your CoCo is up to you, but ask yourself this, would you have done this had this board been available in the 1980s? Of course you would.

Meanwhile should you become bored with the CoCo, it can also be persuaded to emulate an Apple ][.