Amiga 500 Vampire is alive

[demolition]

They are not up for sale yet and I have not seen any preorder lists. Not even a price, although I imagine it should be similar to the 600 V2.

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by wolfchild

@Kipper2k: I want to buy an Amiga 500 Vampire. Is there a waiting or pre-order list I need to enrol in? Not in any particular hurry, but just decided I want one

There is no list atm and internal testing will begin shortly, it will not be as long as for the V600 as most of the core is complete. Once public release is close we will release details.

[wolfchild]

Thanks, and looking forward to what is possibly the best and only upgrade needed for my A500

Ed

[kipper2k]

Hi All,

Phew, Where to begin, there has been a lot of new developments during the course of the last few days and i think you will like them.

- Lets start off with the SD card functionality, it is now working and speeds are in excess of 3.4MB/s (That is Megabytes, not bits) and you can set what format you want to use whether it be fat95 (ideal for copying files to and from your PC) or the other popular formats. Most SD cards appear to be compatible, some cards may be slower but they are cheap and you can spend a couple $$ etc to get a class 10 (apparently sandisk not too good, but we need to verify this)

Here is a (quite long) video of setting up a 128GB SD card in OS3.9)..
a great tutorial...




- Next up is the completed SFS bugfix which is for those people having issues with the drives.


- Next up the next core will have support for large drive partitions


and next, the big one i think people are waiting for...

Programmable screen resolutions which can be also modified by the end user so people should be able yo find something that works for them. Video links are at the bottom. The new core should be released soon, we are just doing a little more testing, there has also been a few more speed tweaks and also a little reworking of instructions to make them that little bit faster.

I am going to paste Flypes post here......

---------------
Great news here !
If all goes well, next core release will have the so awaited screen changing resolution feature

Last week-end, we in team tested the feature. This is very promising as it has been validated in many different resolutions.

You can see a early video of the feature testing here :

[ Show youtube player ]

These are early tests, driver will need to be updated, which should not be long wait.

Basically, the core supports any 'consistent' resolution, in all depths. It is just a matter of defining new screen definitions in SYS:Prefs/Picasso96Mode.

We at the moment successfully tested these resolutions, in any depth :


- 640x480@60Hz
- 800x600@60Hz
- 848x480@60Hz
- 960x540@60Hz
- 1024x600@60Hz
- 1024x768@50Hz
- 1120x832@50Hz
- 1152x900@50Hz
- 1280x720@24Hz
- 1280x1024@24Hz
-----------

The screen resolution functionality has been cleaned up a little more so it will be the easiest and most efficient display adapter available for your Vampire equipped Amiga. Due to the fact that the Vampire uses CPU power to provide HDMI output you would think it drains the CPU power but tests are showing (using the minibench) that at high Res there are still 90MIPS free for the CPU to perform other tasks. Please remember that sysinfo is not a very good tool for measuring 68040 CPu etc


For those that want to read the full progress reports please head over to http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php if you have questions or want to contribute etc please join the IRC channel (shown in forum)


And finally, i would like to leave you with this picture....

http://postimg.org/image/76mq3dci9/

Merry Xmas!

[desiv]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

And finally, i would like to leave you with this picture....
http://postimg.org/image/76mq3dci9/

Flypes, You are a mean mean person...
And I mean that in the best possible way...

In the words of Inigo Montoya..
I hate waiting..


Awesome!!

desiv

[dirkies]

So we can expect 1200 vampires around xmas...

Hopefully the vampire range will be expanded in 2017 to all classic Amiga models, with an A3000/4000 CPU slot version

[grond]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

Due to the fact that the Vampire uses CPU power to provide HDMI output you would think it drains the CPU power but tests are showing (using the minibench) that at high Res there are still 90MIPS free for the CPU to perform other tasks.

This is worded a bit inaccurately. Of course, the hdmi part is totally independent of the CPU but -- just like the Amiga custom chips -- needs to read graphics data from the memory. Thus, the RTG modes take some bandwidth from the enormously fast on-board fastmem. This means that with RTG enabled the CPU sometimes will have to wait for the access to the memory because RTG DMA is prioritised (you wouldn't want to get random black sports on the screen under high CPU load, would you?). RTG DMA is buffered so that it can give priority to the CPU as long as the buffer isn't running too low which gives some memory bandwidth and thus lost speed back to the CPU. As kipper said the effect on CPU speed is quite low but it gets bigger with increasing screen resolutions and colour depths.

[Retrofan]

Congratulations for the achievements guys!

[eXeler0]

Exciting to see the 1200 version emerge. Is the Cyclone III on it a placeholder or a hint that some design decisions have been made by the Apollo-core team? :-)

Skickat från min HTC One via Tapatalk

[voyager]

I hope you will put some ram on that 3d render before you send it out for production :-)

[Mr.Flibble]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

And finally, i would like to leave you with this picture....

http://postimg.org/image/76mq3dci9/

Merry Xmas!

*throws money at screen*

...

A4000 version after that? *ducks*

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

And finally, i would like to leave you with this picture....

http://postimg.org/image/76mq3dci9/

Merry Xmas!

Kipper... I want it . Put me first on the list

And... Do you see my signature? Why do you believe the first Amiga there is a "Vanilla one"? I sold my heavy equipment (BPPC, BVision, etc, etc) just waiting for this to happen.

[kipper2k]

Hi all,

Finally got the V500 boards today...

Built one and here you go...

http://www.kipper2k.com/video/helloworld.mp4

[dirkies]

Yesss. Bring em on!

[chiark]

Wonderful! Love my 500, and this is going to cause a real question of whether to stick with the IDE68k + CSA MMR 030 in my favourite 500, or put a vampire in there... (There's no argument really, vampire will win hands down!)

[kipper2k]

just to mention, i tried the v500 in PAL V3, 5, 6a and 8 (amiga 500+) and also NTSC 6a and all booted successfully. 128MB fastmem is active

[VectrexRoli]

Amazing, that would give new life to my old Amiga 500. Will this be sold on your web page, or do I need to sign up for some kind of pre-order list first? Sorry for the stupid question, but I am quite new to the Amiga scene.

[majikeyric]

Greeeeat!!!!

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by VectrexRoli

Amazing, that would give new life to my old Amiga 500. Will this be sold on your web page, or do I need to sign up for some kind of pre-order list first? Sorry for the stupid question, but I am quite new to the Amiga scene.

Before we start doing pre-orders the team need to debug the V500, there are different things that need to be addressed such as IDE, chipset etc. Once it is on a similar level with the a600 releases then we will start the pre-order process. Timeframe is unknown at present, there are a lot of behind the scenes work going on so please bear with us

[kipper2k]

this is what i am using for a CF adapter, it is available on ebay and dirt cheap, it does not interfere with the keyboard...




here is the EBay url..