The Legality of The Vampire Itself

nonarkitten · 04 June 2020, 22:11

I know there's a thread on the legality of CoffinOS that was recently shut down and some innuendo's dropped about the general ethics of the Apollo Team and why one should boycott them. As a former Apollo Team member, I can say that there's more than the Kickstart and OS being ripped off here.

This may all be old news -- if it is, I apologize up front. Way back in 2003, the original NatAmi project was looking to be a 68030 accelerator for the C-One, an infamous FPGA based computer meant to replace the Commodore 64.

Around 2008, the Natami was going to use the 68060 processor instead, the last and fastest 680x0 processor, but even then, these chips were in short-supply. There was some debate about using the ColdFire instead, but it's incompatibilities with the 680x0 and closed-source nature of AmigaOS made it an unrealistic proposition.

And then IP Extreme released the ColdFire V1 "free". You could sign up, download the core and program it to you Altera Cyclone. And, if you happened to have the "key", you could use Quartus to reverse engineer the binary file and get something close to the source.

Then, Apollo announces they're going to drop ColdFire AND 68060 and make a 68060-class clone in FPGA instead dubbed the 68050 and 68070. Almost overnight they apparently had something they could show some relative performance of, as if, by **MAGIC**. Now, whether he actually reverse engineered the free core or used that as an excuse to use source he acquired while working for IBM, I don't know -- there is evidence supporting both of these possibilities.

Of course the ColdFire core, whether it be a soft or hard is still incompatible with the 680x0. Which brings me to Exhibit "A":

https://community.nxp.com/thread/307326

"While creating a super scalar Coldfire ISA-C compatible FPGA Core implementation, I've noticed some possible "Enhancements" of the ISA."

And proceeds to explain exactly what you do to a ColdFire core to make it much, much more compatible with the 680x0. He does go onto claim that it's not based on the "V4" (true) and his own design (suspect).

This interestingly also coincides with Majsta dropping the TG68K core for his own Vampire 600 accelerator, or V1 as it's called now. Later cores that became "closed source" ran substantially faster than the TG68K and yet still fit on a rather small FPGA core.

It wasn't long after that when we started seeing the first prototypes running that rotozoomer and we were all like "woah"....

The second bit of evidence, Exhibit "B" comes from an interesting bit of source code in the Apollo Team FTP called pheonixXXX.s. This little bit of source code looks very much like a stripped-down version of MicroAPL's ColdFire 68K "emulator" (documented here: http://microapl.com/Porting/ColdFire...d/CF68KLib.pdf) which uses the processor exceptions to handle the unimplemented instructions and/or addressing modes. Specifically, you can see the addressing mode handling, bitfield instructions ... all put into exception handlers because these instructions did not exist on the ColdFire at all.

https://pastebin.com/YnK0L7ta

This file really evolved over time and I suspect that they added vectors to handle missing instructions faster (and was why their FPSP was pretty fast at FPU emulation). After a while it didn't bear much resemblance any more but the spirit was still there -- add into software what was missing between the ColdFire and 68K.

Much later version:

https://pastebin.com/bVG2AhAX

They decided to move to the V2 and redo all that logic in the core. I doubt the V2 still uses any of this. Between V1 and V2, the core ballooned from around 6000 LEs to nearly 29000 by the end of its development arc. Aside from minor bug fixes, I would say the V2 development is dead now.

The third interesting bit, Exhibit "C" comes from one of Apollo's most interesting features -- instruction fusing. The ColdFire V4 core claimed, erroneously, that it was superscalar by implementing a form of instruction fusing that could combine two instructions into one. This is the EXACT SAME feature present in the Apollo core and was present before true superscalar was born on the Vampire V2 and the never-publically-released ColdFire v5.

This comes from the V4, of course, but I'll point out that the V1 came long after the V2, V3 and V4 -- it was a stripped down V4, not a V1 predecessor. It's possible that much of the logic was easy to re-add.

https://i.imgur.com/bRxTrH2.png

Lastly is the issue of the FPU. I need to preface this with the fact that in OpenCores.org there are no complete FPU implementations -- FPUs are hard and very complex, especially when you want to do things like deep pipelines for single-cycle division.

When FPU was first demoed on the Vampire is was using a "lightly accelerated" version of FPSP and pulled off an impressive MFLOPS score (for emulation). This was DURING the development of GOLD2.7 way back in September 2017.

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge...=8608&z=9BgCFO

Then, faced with criticism, as if by magic, almost literally overnight, we suddenly had an almost perfect working (ignoring precision limitations) FPU core pushing almost 90 MFLOPS. A fully pipelined, 68040 compatible core that is cycle-to-cycle faster than even the 68060 was materialized overnight after Gunnar has fought tirelessly to not waste his time with FPU at all.

Now, all of this is still, sadly, a little circumstantial and would hardly hold up in a court of law.

And to play my own devil's advocate, if they had the sources, then why did we get that bastard son of AltiVec and MMX instead of the ColdFire EMAC. Why didn't we also get the ColdFire V4's impressive MMU that's mostly compatible with 68K while enhancing it greatly. For development, I'd much rather have an MMU than a "full" FPU, even if there's "no software for it."

I don't know -- those could be ideological decisions. Maybe Gunnar didn't want to play all his cards on the table like that and make it too obvious.

Anyway, that's my two-cents. I honestly have no problem with the V2 and I have no problem with it being allegedly based on the ColdFire core. It's a great board and the best bang-for-the-buck accelerator on the Amiga. That doesn't mean I approve of that group's ethics or heavy-handed behavior and that's why I left the team.

IP Extreme has long since removed the ColdFire V1 core from it's website, although you can still find it through the Wayback Machine. I'm not sure why they reversed this decision -- I doubt a few thousand boards sold out of Eastern Europe had any affect. But it makes you wonder.

I'd leave it up to everyone to make up their own minds on this one and maybe if we actually get to see the source, we can say for certain whether or not the Apollo Team owes Silvaco (nee IP Extreme) several thousand in back-royalties.

FREEMILK · 04 June 2020, 22:17

Awesome info .

DamienD · 04 June 2020, 22:50

Heya nonarkitten,

Thank you for your post.

Definitely implies even more than we thought; and that the Apollo team are most definitely a dodgy bunch at the very least.

...but I don't really want to kick this off again.

However, I'll leave the thread open for now as people need to know the truth, but it has to remain civil.

Samurai_Crow · 04 June 2020, 22:53

@nonarkitten

The 68050 wasn't superscalar. The 68070 was though.

@thread

Gunnar could have licensed IP from his former employer at IBM. In fact there used to be a bar graph on the Apollo team website indicating performance between softcores running on a high-end Stratix FPGA devboard at IBM. Softcores that all had FPU code. IBM chose the PPC 440 softcore because their OS required an MMU. The 68050 was faster because it didn't have one.

Let's not jump to conclusions.

DesertBlizzard · 04 June 2020, 23:34

Take it up with the Apollo team and keep the speculation out of the public until hard evidence or better, proof if something illegal, can be provided. All you are doing is smearing people. What is your agenda?

This is why we cannot have nice things.

DamienD · 04 June 2020, 23:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesertBlizzard

This is why we cannot have nice things.

You can, but your post clearly shows that you really don't care how it comes about, or who possibly gets screwed over... real nice, that's a great attitude

DesertBlizzard · 04 June 2020, 23:48

This line "Now, all of this is still, sadly, a little circumstantial", and this word "sadly", tells me all I need to know about the purpose of this thread. The hypocrisy of this site and so many of the people here is just baffling.

Seriously. This is all a hobby for a few people left in the world. Reverse engineering is not illegal, and there is no proof that anything other than this has occurred.

What is your agenda DamienD? Why the hatred for all things Vampire? What is the threat?

DamienD · 04 June 2020, 23:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesertBlizzard

This line "Now, all of this is still, sadly, a little circumstantial", and this word "sadly", tells me all I need to know about the purpose of this thread. The hypocrisy of this site and so many of the people here is just baffling.

Seriously. This is all a hobby for a few people left in the world. Reverse engineering is not illegal, and there is no proof that anything other than this has occurred.

nonarkitten is a former Apollo Team member... she's allowed to say why she left; and would know quite a bit on the subject I'd imagine.

More than you, that's for sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesertBlizzard

What is your agenda DamienD? Why the hatred for all things Vampire? What is the threat?

Again, I couldn't care less about Vampire... but I do get annoyed if a commercial company is possibly acting dodgy.

Anyway, this is not about me... back to the topic please.

Samurai_Crow · 04 June 2020, 23:52

Reverse engineering might not have even been necessary. I was told in no uncertain terms by an IBM engineer that Coldfire was just an attempt to slap 680x0 instruction sets onto a second generation PowerPC. Gunnar used to work on PPC CPUs for a living.

DesertBlizzard · 04 June 2020, 23:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by DamienD

nonarkitten is a former Apollo Team member... he's allowed to say why he left; and would know quite a bit on the subject I'd imagine.

I don't care who she is. "Former" is probably for the good however. Regardless, the agenda is what I find interesting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DamienD

possibly acting dodgy.

I think "possibly" pretty much says all I need to know.

What is the threat? Why the hate for all things Vampire?

Samurai_Crow · 05 June 2020, 00:05

Nonarkitten has different reasons than I do for leaving the Apollo team. Her evidence is not very compelling in that her case is based on the premise that Gunnar used a Coldfire superscalar design as the basis for his 68050 core. The fact that the 68050 was NOT superscalar pokes a massive hole in that hypothesis.

E-Penguin · 05 June 2020, 00:05

If you don't like it, don't buy it. Endless vitriol isn't helping anyone.

Ian · 05 June 2020, 00:09

I'm nipping this in the bud before it gets going....

Move along one and all.

DamienD · 05 June 2020, 00:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

I wouldn't dream of it...

...but people are allowed to discuss commercial company's conduct; are they not?

Ian · 05 June 2020, 00:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Nonarkitten has different reasons than I do for leaving the Apollo team. Her evidence is not very compelling in that her case is based on the premise that Gunnar used a Coldfire superscalar design as the basis for his 68050 core. The fact that the 68050 was NOT superscalar pokes a massive hole in that hypothesis.

To be honest, I would expect someone who worked on the project to have a little more than circumstantial evidence about what was alledgely going on.

I can sense the incoming poopstorm, and frankly if it needs to happen, then it better be based on infallable evidence, as I don't have the time, knowledge or motivation to police such a topic.

As it stands it's a nice work of fiction, but it's already triggered some so it's done with.

Any problems with this, then please shout at me in my left ear, I'll make sure to take my hearing aid out.

DamienD · 05 June 2020, 11:03

I received a PM from Thomas Richter.

For the sake of clarity; I'm posting in this thread:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thomas Ritcher

Damien,

The "legality" thread is closed for good, but there is at least one thing I want to mention, as I don't want to leave the wrong expression and want to clarify the legal status of the phoenix unimplemented instruction emulator.

nonarkitten posted a link to one software for the Phoenix unimplemented software emulator from which she believes that it is a reworked version of a coldfire software emulator.

Please be ensured that this second code is certainly not based on software infringed by third party rights. I wrote that software. It was a one-week "fun" job to do, and this software was released for testing by me for the vampire team.

There are many things that are "not quite right" IMHO, but that one is not, and I do not want to leave the impression that this Phoenix software emulator piece is one of them.

The second software is, as far as legality is concerned, completely fine.

I would be great if you could the followers of the thread know this.

Thanks,
Thomas

DamienD · 05 June 2020, 12:07

Again, for the sake of transparency... here's a PM from Samurai_Crow to Ian:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

My logic was flawed on the Vampire thread that was locked. Nonarkitten reminded me that the Coldfire v1 that Gunnar was accused of plagiarizing also wasn't superscalar and therefore her logic still stands. Please note that in my final post that you quoted. I was wrong.

04 June 2020, 22:11	#1
nonarkitten Registered User Join Date: Jun 2018 Location: Calgary/Canada Posts: 247	The Legality of The Vampire Itself I know there's a thread on the legality of CoffinOS that was recently shut down and some innuendo's dropped about the general ethics of the Apollo Team and why one should boycott them. As a former Apollo Team member, I can say that there's more than the Kickstart and OS being ripped off here. This may all be old news -- if it is, I apologize up front. Way back in 2003, the original NatAmi project was looking to be a 68030 accelerator for the C-One, an infamous FPGA based computer meant to replace the Commodore 64. Around 2008, the Natami was going to use the 68060 processor instead, the last and fastest 680x0 processor, but even then, these chips were in short-supply. There was some debate about using the ColdFire instead, but it's incompatibilities with the 680x0 and closed-source nature of AmigaOS made it an unrealistic proposition. And then IP Extreme released the ColdFire V1 "free". You could sign up, download the core and program it to you Altera Cyclone. And, if you happened to have the "key", you could use Quartus to reverse engineer the binary file and get something close to the source. Then, Apollo announces they're going to drop ColdFire AND 68060 and make a 68060-class clone in FPGA instead dubbed the 68050 and 68070. Almost overnight they apparently had something they could show some relative performance of, as if, by MAGIC. Now, whether he actually reverse engineered the free core or used that as an excuse to use source he acquired while working for IBM, I don't know -- there is evidence supporting both of these possibilities. Of course the ColdFire core, whether it be a soft or hard is still incompatible with the 680x0. Which brings me to Exhibit "A": https://community.nxp.com/thread/307326 "While creating a super scalar Coldfire ISA-C compatible FPGA Core implementation, I've noticed some possible "Enhancements" of the ISA." And proceeds to explain exactly what you do to a ColdFire core to make it much, much more compatible with the 680x0. He does go onto claim that it's not based on the "V4" (true) and his own design (suspect). This interestingly also coincides with Majsta dropping the TG68K core for his own Vampire 600 accelerator, or V1 as it's called now. Later cores that became "closed source" ran substantially faster than the TG68K and yet still fit on a rather small FPGA core. It wasn't long after that when we started seeing the first prototypes running that rotozoomer and we were all like "woah".... The second bit of evidence, Exhibit "B" comes from an interesting bit of source code in the Apollo Team FTP called pheonixXXX.s. This little bit of source code looks very much like a stripped-down version of MicroAPL's ColdFire 68K "emulator" (documented here: http://microapl.com/Porting/ColdFire...d/CF68KLib.pdf) which uses the processor exceptions to handle the unimplemented instructions and/or addressing modes. Specifically, you can see the addressing mode handling, bitfield instructions ... all put into exception handlers because these instructions did not exist on the ColdFire at all. https://pastebin.com/YnK0L7ta This file really evolved over time and I suspect that they added vectors to handle missing instructions faster (and was why their FPSP was pretty fast at FPU emulation). After a while it didn't bear much resemblance any more but the spirit was still there -- add into software what was missing between the ColdFire and 68K. Much later version: https://pastebin.com/bVG2AhAX They decided to move to the V2 and redo all that logic in the core. I doubt the V2 still uses any of this. Between V1 and V2, the core ballooned from around 6000 LEs to nearly 29000 by the end of its development arc. Aside from minor bug fixes, I would say the V2 development is dead now. The third interesting bit, Exhibit "C" comes from one of Apollo's most interesting features -- instruction fusing. The ColdFire V4 core claimed, erroneously, that it was superscalar by implementing a form of instruction fusing that could combine two instructions into one. This is the EXACT SAME feature present in the Apollo core and was present before true superscalar was born on the Vampire V2 and the never-publically-released ColdFire v5. This comes from the V4, of course, but I'll point out that the V1 came long after the V2, V3 and V4 -- it was a stripped down V4, not a V1 predecessor. It's possible that much of the logic was easy to re-add. https://i.imgur.com/bRxTrH2.png Lastly is the issue of the FPU. I need to preface this with the fact that in OpenCores.org there are no complete FPU implementations -- FPUs are hard and very complex, especially when you want to do things like deep pipelines for single-cycle division. When FPU was first demoed on the Vampire is was using a "lightly accelerated" version of FPSP and pulled off an impressive MFLOPS score (for emulation). This was DURING the development of GOLD2.7 way back in September 2017. http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge...=8608&z=9BgCFO Then, faced with criticism, as if by magic, almost literally overnight, we suddenly had an almost perfect working (ignoring precision limitations) FPU core pushing almost 90 MFLOPS. A fully pipelined, 68040 compatible core that is cycle-to-cycle faster than even the 68060 was materialized overnight after Gunnar has fought tirelessly to not waste his time with FPU at all. Now, all of this is still, sadly, a little circumstantial and would hardly hold up in a court of law. And to play my own devil's advocate, if they had the sources, then why did we get that bastard son of AltiVec and MMX instead of the ColdFire EMAC. Why didn't we also get the ColdFire V4's impressive MMU that's mostly compatible with 68K while enhancing it greatly. For development, I'd much rather have an MMU than a "full" FPU, even if there's "no software for it." I don't know -- those could be ideological decisions. Maybe Gunnar didn't want to play all his cards on the table like that and make it too obvious. Anyway, that's my two-cents. I honestly have no problem with the V2 and I have no problem with it being allegedly based on the ColdFire core. It's a great board and the best bang-for-the-buck accelerator on the Amiga. That doesn't mean I approve of that group's ethics or heavy-handed behavior and that's why I left the team. IP Extreme has long since removed the ColdFire V1 core from it's website, although you can still find it through the Wayback Machine. I'm not sure why they reversed this decision -- I doubt a few thousand boards sold out of Eastern Europe had any affect. But it makes you wonder. I'd leave it up to everyone to make up their own minds on this one and maybe if we actually get to see the source, we can say for certain whether or not the Apollo Team owes Silvaco (nee IP Extreme) several thousand in back-royalties.

04 June 2020, 22:50	#3
DamienD Banned Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: London / Sydney Age: 47 Posts: 20,420	Heya nonarkitten, Thank you for your post. Definitely implies even more than we thought; and that the Apollo team are most definitely a dodgy bunch at the very least. ...but I don't really want to kick this off again. However, I'll leave the thread open for now as people need to know the truth, but it has to remain civil. Last edited by DamienD; 04 June 2020 at 23:15.

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04 June 2020, 22:17	#2
FREEMILK Registered User Join Date: Jan 2016 Location: North Bay, Ontario, Canada Posts: 67	Awesome info .

04 June 2020, 22:53	#4
Samurai_Crow Total Chaos forever! Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Waterville, MN, USA Age: 49 Posts: 2,186	@nonarkitten The 68050 wasn't superscalar. The 68070 was though. @thread Gunnar could have licensed IP from his former employer at IBM. In fact there used to be a bar graph on the Apollo team website indicating performance between softcores running on a high-end Stratix FPGA devboard at IBM. Softcores that all had FPU code. IBM chose the PPC 440 softcore because their OS required an MMU. The 68050 was faster because it didn't have one. Let's not jump to conclusions.

04 June 2020, 23:34	#5
DesertBlizzard Registered User Join Date: Jul 2018 Location: Gilbert Posts: 16	Take it up with the Apollo team and keep the speculation out of the public until hard evidence or better, proof if something illegal, can be provided. All you are doing is smearing people. What is your agenda? This is why we cannot have nice things.

04 June 2020, 23:48	#7
DesertBlizzard Registered User Join Date: Jul 2018 Location: Gilbert Posts: 16	This line "Now, all of this is still, sadly, a little circumstantial", and this word "sadly", tells me all I need to know about the purpose of this thread. The hypocrisy of this site and so many of the people here is just baffling. Seriously. This is all a hobby for a few people left in the world. Reverse engineering is not illegal, and there is no proof that anything other than this has occurred. What is your agenda DamienD? Why the hatred for all things Vampire? What is the threat?

04 June 2020, 23:52	#9
Samurai_Crow Total Chaos forever! Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Waterville, MN, USA Age: 49 Posts: 2,186	Reverse engineering might not have even been necessary. I was told in no uncertain terms by an IBM engineer that Coldfire was just an attempt to slap 680x0 instruction sets onto a second generation PowerPC. Gunnar used to work on PPC CPUs for a living.

05 June 2020, 00:05	#11
Samurai_Crow Total Chaos forever! Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Waterville, MN, USA Age: 49 Posts: 2,186	Nonarkitten has different reasons than I do for leaving the Apollo team. Her evidence is not very compelling in that her case is based on the premise that Gunnar used a Coldfire superscalar design as the basis for his 68050 core. The fact that the 68050 was NOT superscalar pokes a massive hole in that hypothesis.

05 June 2020, 00:05	#12
E-Penguin Banana Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Darmstadt Posts: 1,213	If you don't like it, don't buy it. Endless vitriol isn't helping anyone.

05 June 2020, 00:09	#13
Ian Global Moderator Join Date: May 2001 Location: Derby, UK Age: 46 Posts: 2,287	I'm nipping this in the bud before it gets going.... Move along one and all.

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