Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4

[Sinphaltimus]

Originally Posted by Ffin

That's beyond the scope of the Vampire project, especially as it would require new keyboards, which nobody seems to be working on right now. It would be much easier to design a 3D printed mounting bracket which fits the new A1200 cases and use extension cables to connect the IO ports to the rear of the case, although you'll still need a keyboard.

there are at least two projects making new Amiga cases that do support Vampire standalone installs. One is an A500 case replica and the other is the checkmate cases. So options are available even now. I suspect more will surface when the actual board is released. They are of course coming from third parties.

[Ffin]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

there are at least two projects making new Amiga cases that do support Vampire standalone installs. One is an A500 case replica and the other is the checkmate cases. So options are available even now. I suspect more will surface when the actual board is released. They are of course coming from third parties.

Yes, both of those cases may take a Vampire, but I was replying to sokolovic who wanted "a brand new wedge Amiga kb sold with the Vampire". The checkmate case isn't a wedge, I think an A500 case would be overkill for something as small as the Vampire standalone, but more importantly neither of them address the issue of keyboards.

[sean_sk]

Originally Posted by Ffin

Edge connectors are an issue for the A1200 version, which may not have been resolved yet.

No it's not an issue. They sourced a supplier quite some time ago.

[Sinphaltimus]

Originally Posted by Ffin

Yes, both of those cases may take a Vampire, but I was replying to sokolovic who wanted "a brand new wedge Amiga kb sold with the Vampire". The checkmate case isn't a wedge, I think an A500 case would be overkill for something as small as the Vampire standalone, but more importantly neither of them address the issue of keyboards.

Yep, I agree, my only point was that if there is enough demand, these things will probably happen sometime in the future after the V4 stand-alone is out and being used. But, admittedly, I do not have ESP. just wishful thinking.

[kolla]

The V4 standalone is (will be) tiny enough to fit in _any_ Amiga case. If you want one in an A1200 case, you just need a tiny plate or bracket that fit a few of the original screw holes, and with new holes for the V4 - people have done this with lots of other boards already. To be honest, I have little motivation to support the A500 case project, as I don't have any A500 at the moment, and I find it rather too big to be practical. But I do certainly appreciate the effort, so I may support just for the sake of having the molds made. What I really need and want, are new Amiga keyboards - using PC keyboards in general, and half baked solutions for PC keyboards with Amiga like Keyrah, very frustrating.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

This is a nice idea but you have to get rid of the old carcasses, AMiGA has always been innovative, I think the V4 should be in a modern case in this way it could also attract new users of other platforms.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

it could also attract new users of other platforms.

You do all user support then, and explaining why Amiga cannot have modern features?

[Amigan123]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

This is a nice idea but you have to get rid of the old carcasses, AMiGA has always been innovative, I think the V4 should be in a modern case in this way it could also attract new users of other platforms.

I posted about this new case yesterday, fits amiga 500,600,1200 + vampire board

www.amigasystems.com

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Beautiful, now that you reason !
Amiga when he was born was presented in a sheet and then placed inside a house that did not belong to him given its emancipation.

[Sinphaltimus]

Originally Posted by jediknight

i want one nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww standalone one for me sounds awesome.

Here ya go - AmigaStore.eu has them in stock NOW. (V500v2+) I know you want standalone. But teaser teaser...


http://amigastore.eu/en/595-vampire-500-v2.html

[Anubis]

Why I have a feeling this will be in range of $500+, which is a no go for me, since I don't like to spend too much on hoby, while I can still run all games/programs on pc/rpi...

Sure, would be nice to fit one in my old A1200, or perhaps standalone one, but definitely not at that price.

[kolla]

Only 370 euros for V500v2+ - cheap!

[puppypc]

Is there really any reason why the standalone would cost a lot more than the cards? It should have the added bonus of not having to pay for an edge connector

[Samurai_Crow]

@puppypc

The v2 cards are cheaper than v4 cards. Stand alone will use v4 as a minimum.

[Marlon_]

Originally Posted by puppypc

Is there really any reason why the standalone would cost a lot more than the cards? It should have the added bonus of not having to pay for an edge connector

V4 will be more expensive than V2 because of bigger fpga, 512MB ram instead of 128, built-in ethernet, USB, db9 etc.

V4 standalone vs V4 for A500 shouldn’t have a price difference really.

[Retrofan]

Hiya. I can not read all of what you post here.

My question is: What will be first, the stand alone or the A1200 version?. Maybe both at the same time?

[Tigerskunk]

My guess is that the Standalone will be first to be released.

The 1200 one wasn't even announced yet, was it?

[Marlon_]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

Hiya. I can not read all of what you post here.

My question is: What will be first, the stand alone or the A1200 version?. Maybe both at the same time?

V4 A500 accelerator first, then standalone, then V1200 as far as I know.

[pcotter]

First contact with the upcoming Vampire V4.
Tests on the Amiga 2000 with and without CPU adapter and on the Amiga 500, Rev 5

[ Show youtube player ]

[Overflow]

Apollo Team Activity Report (June 2018)

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=15593

June Activity Report
Exciting weeks lately in the Apollo Team as quite a lot of things happened in a very small timeframe on both hardware and software sides. Summer will for sure be hot in the Vampire and Amiga community. Sit down, relax and enjoy a glass of blood with us because we have several topics to cover this month.

Vampire V4
If your remember last Activity Report from May, we had to admit we were struggling on a bug we weren?t able to locate the source and this for weeks and weeks. During the night of 2nd of June, ceaich and BigGun finally found the reason and fixed it, definitively. Hurray !

Some team members were during that particular evening attending the OufParty 5 in Martigny (Switzerland). When they got the information, they instantly left the dinnertable, leaving creamy raclette and fresh white wine alone to teleport themself in front of their Vampire V4 developer boards to test that freshly baked core : for the first time ever since Neuss, the Vampire V4 worked perfectly on every Amiga 500 mainboard tested. I won?t comment what came next, mostly because I?m missing part of it and because it was mainly made from alcohol and cigars (which might explain why I?m missing those parts).

So from now, our next step is now to send Vampire V4 cards to all testers in team to go forward on finalizing the product before releasing it on the market.

Those final steps will require some time but we can now see the light out of the tunnel.

Software-side
I wanted to put software as second topic of this activity report because we also got some nice development in the Apollo Team cavern :
- Bax is working as always as a shaolin monk on the driver side. New SDNet and ExpNetV2 should bring new features like multicasting/SANA-II (letting you use network within ShapeShifter), while improving performance and reliability.
- Nonarkitten is working on GnGeo and is squeezing every single FPS she can out from it
- Inflammasome is working on improving his STonAmiga software

Card Registration
As stated in the apollo-core forum, we have announced we are closing card registration website at end of June. This had to end to serve its purpose and I will try to explain why.

As you might know, we have been aware that some cloned cards were in the wild that?s the reason why the registration system came to battle against such black market. Registering a card on our website allowed us to double check that we had corresponding serial number in our database and add it to our whitelist. Only « downside » of a non-registered card was the user was getting a black and white screen on Digital Output (and only beginning from GOLD2.7 cores) but could still use its card.

Cards coming from majsta were all already in our database, ence were « pre-whitelisted », cards coming from kippa weren?t all in that database.

As of today, users are all getting cards flashed with GOLD2.5 core, which doesn?t implement the whitelist system and let them already use their card out of the box in full color. This give us some time to cook new and updated GOLD2.9 cores including those serials. This system isn?t ideal as there is still a period for users to wait for an updated whitelist to flash their card and get full colors but it is the only solution to make sure cloned cards won?t offer same level of features as a legit card. We are not only protecting our IP but also customer investments here.

I would personnaly like to thank all people who played the game and registered their card. It was a pain not only for customers but also for team as we would have prefered to spend time on other things than building a database of serials, cooking whitelist, updating cores, etc.

We have also read some funny comments about GDPR regarding our registration system. It?s obvious that some more knowledge regarding what GDPR really is might be required there. We have a Privacy Policy stated on our website, directly accessible within the form, a confirmation dialog in the registration form asking for approval and we only ask for datas we require to bring users a good level of support. Datas we are processing aren?t « sensitive » (unlike medical datas, religion and sexual preference, etc.) and people pushing us on that kind of discussion field are in fact spreading FUD (but we are used to it). I?ll stop there otherwise some might think that a famous amiga hardware producer wrote that paragraph (which would require use of the usual criminal damage, slander, defamation, insults, conspiracy and some more blah blah words).

Today we think we have erradicated any will to build and sell more cloned cards. The registration served its purpose. Some users, might still not have registered their card but we will support them in that process even if registration system is closed. Just get in touch with me when needed. No worry.

GOLD3
BigGun announced GOLD3 for Vampire cards for this summer. We are all pretty confident that our AGA will be really super and every day core is being improved with new fixes to let us play more and more games.

It?s actually difficult to describe how good it feels when an AGA games runs perfectly on an OCS/ECS Amiga but each us might remember in the days how frustrating it was not being able to run them on our « Denised » miggies. This time is soon over.