Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by DDNI
[I

£299 for the A500 V2. This V4 will be more expensive.
Why not just buy a Rasp Pi v3 and emulate now for under a £100?[/I]

Originally Posted by wawa

why does that bother you?

One perspective it's now basically something like this:

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/pa...yNo=167&No=941

Sure the V4 has more LE's, but that board is $90. So you're buying €100 worth of hardware with a €250 software license. This doesn't apply to the magic of adding plug in compatibility to the A500/A2000/CDTV. So why not take a cheap off the shelf board and slap the core on it and call it a day. It makes buying a retail copy of Windows seem cheap.

I know classic hardware is expensive and that shouldn't really enter into the discussion, but many people would say if you want to run an Amiga-like system and you care about price, buy a $50 Mac G4 or G5 (or x86) and run MorphOS (or WinUAE) on it which will be many times faster than this.

But if you want to turn your Amiga into a keyboard adapter there's nothing that's going to be faster, aside from putting a Keyrah inside of an Amiga case.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

It would be extremely easy for them to run a Vampire just like a cheaper and faster accelerator.

No, it isn't, and that's also why such a product doesn't exist.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Akira

No, it isn't, and that's also why such a product doesn't exist.

You're right it's not easy but such a product does exist. It is called a Vampire V2. It is cheaper and faster than your average 060 but is still just an accelerator with integrated RTG (which you don't have to use). At least as long as you stick with Gold2.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by demolition

You're right it's not easy but such a product does exist. It is called a Vampire V2. It is cheaper and faster than your average 060 but is still just an accelerator with integrated RTG (which you don't have to use). At least as long as you stick with Gold2.

There is barely any overlap between Vampire2 and 68060, the only system where you can really chose between them is on the A2000. There are no Vampire cards for other systems for where 68060 cards exist.

[sean_sk]

Originally Posted by Akira

The A1200's AGA will probably not even be used, especially if you want to use the HDMI out.

Basically your A1200 becomes an I/O unit, none of it is used except the ports. The CPU, the custom chips, all that is gone.

Yeah so? I don't know why it's so hard to understand that there are still those that enjoy the look and feel of the original Amiga package but still want the option to mess around with the hardware and add other stuff to see what it can do. It's part of the fun. It's not just about the software. I for one would lose some enjoyment if all my Amiga computer amounted to was a small Raspberry Pi sized circuit board in a generic small Raspberry Pi sized case. May as well get a Raspberry Pi.

Originally Posted by Akira

Vampire is NOT an Amiga accelerator. It's a LOT more. It's unfair to call it an accelerator, and in my opinion, it's silly to stick it to an old wedge to run.

But it can be used as just an accelerator. That's the way I have it set up in my A600. I'm still using the ECS chipset since that's the way I've chosen to use it for the time being. Some may say using a V600 in that fashion is a waste but I look at it this way, supplies of Motorola 68K chips for accelerator cards won't be around forever, so why not use an FPGA instead? Plus later on I still have the option to try the other features of the V600 if I want to.

If I were to choose to get the standalone Vampire I'd still want to whack it in a new A1200 case and add all the appropriate adapters for the Amiga "look and feel" experience. That's what Amiga means to me. Not everyone wants to do that and that's fine. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, that's the beauty of the Vampire project, it can appeal to a broad spectrum of Amiga fans. As it stands though, I'm not interested in the standalone as I'd prefer one in my exiting Amiga. Looking forward to the V1200.

Originally Posted by Akira

you really want the feeling of Amiga, you should stomach the slow speeds and do things available in 1990, not 2017

Screw that!

[Sim085]

This might sound as a stupid question but isn't the advantage of fpga that you can put any core on same chip? So why the need of a custom board for stand alone? There isn't any existing board out there on which this core can run?

I would understand custom hardware if for example the same board could be used as stand alone or on real amiga models (all) through specific adapters for each of these.

[Samurai_Crow]

FPGA demo boards are licensed for educational use only and don't always use the best components or the biggest FPGA.

[demolition]

Yes, they could probably build the core so it would run on another board with a similar FPGA, but the question is then which board? You would want various connectors and for example on the V4 you have HDMI output, but you may not be able to find this on another board. Or if you do, it may be missing something else.

But it is possible, i.e. you can run an Amiga core on the Turbo Chameleon which was designed with a C64 core.. Perhaps someone will build a C64 core which can run on the V4 board? I wouldn't mind that. It should be plenty big enough to contain a solid C64 implementation with all the bells and whistles.

[amigatv]

https://media1.giphy.com/media/RHiD0K65NxxLO/200_s.gif

[jediknight]

can you add a small ppc chip for me so i can run 4.1 lol please.

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

...It would be extremely easy for them to run a Vampire just like a cheaper and faster accelerator not adding anything new...

Originally Posted by Akira

No, it isn't, and that's also why such a product doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by demolition

You're right it's not easy but such a product does exist. It is called a Vampire V2. It is cheaper and faster than your average 060 but is still just an accelerator with integrated RTG (which you don't have to use). At least as long as you stick with Gold2.

Thanks @demolition.

The answer is that it "wasn't easy" in the past, nowadays in fact it's very easy for them (for them) as I told. All of what they add from a faster accelerator is just because they want and they can.

[seb132]

Great news! I just hope they'll have them manufactured by real electronic manufacturers. Otherwise lots of potential customers will die from their old age before seeing one in the mail...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

But if you want to turn your Amiga into a keyboard adapter there's nothing that's going to be faster

Intel I7 board with 680x0 emulation

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Intel I7 board with 680x0 emulation

That's what I think. And if you use the StandAlone, what do you "feel" different using it?

Oh well, forget me. I think I'll never appreciate the difference.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

That's what I think. And if you use the StandAlone, what do you "feel" different using it?

Oh well, forget me. I think I'll never appreciate the difference.

With software emulation, the timing will generally be all over the place and you will not be able to hook up any timing-critical peripherals like real floppy drives. Also, the speed of the emulation tends to go from very fast to very slow and I know even on my i7, WinUAE can sometimes crawl below A1200 speeds during certain effects if you configure it with good quality emulation of the custom chips. Some of the things that happen in the custom chips can be quite hard to emulate properly in software. With an FPGA implementation, everything basically runs in parallel so the speed will be constant (just like the real chips) and the IO latency is much smaller which enables you to hook up stuff like real floppy drives and other peripherals.

[Mick]

I agree with Retrofan I have a MIST and it's fairly soulless experience in all honesty, you just don't get that same magical feeling of nostalgia in using it.

I think what developers need to do is make the experience of using a clone as close to the original Amiga as possible, it should be like a magicians illusion whereby you can't really tell the difference from a usage standpoint.. by all means add optional .adf support for convenience but to me one of the main interactions (and audible aspects) of a classic Amiga was the floppy drive, as bad as it is today take that interaction away and replace it with an SD card and un-Amigalike menu and suddenly it no longer really feels like you're using a classic Amiga. The first thing I did when I bought another Amiga a few years ago was stock up on DD floppy disks.

I don't necessary think you need to use old Amiga cases and keyboards though, maybe it's the fact that I've been a big PC fan for 2 decades and most Amiga cases today look like they've been to hell and back but I'd personally love to see ITX/MATX form factor with support for PC floppy drives, something like the new A1222 motherboard but for classic Amiga. There are plenty of old PC cases knocking around it'd be like having a big box Amiga except the motherboard is tiny, the thing with a good clone though is that unless you open the actual case people should not really be able to easily tell the difference when it comes to using it.

TLDR: The Amiga had a lot of characteristics that need to be carried over in any clone, otherwise you're tearing the heart out of the Amiga. IMO.

[demolition]

There's a place for both modern FPGA-Amigas as well as the classic ones. Even though I have a couple of Vampire-powered machines and really like them, I also like to use a 'real' Amiga with all its limitations. That also includes the feeling of using genuine floppy disks which is why I wouldn't replace any of the internal drives in my Amigas with floppy emulators. I have a Gotek in an external drive case that I can hook up to any of my Amigas and that takes care of the fact that I also don't want to use real floppies 100% of the time. A small amount of cheating is fine.

Although I don't use it as much as my real Amigas, I also like having WinUAE around. I use it mostly as a tool for maintenance and testing and it makes some of the boring stuff much easier and quicker to get through..

I also agree that having something that looks like an Amiga is a big part of the experience. For me, that is a wedge case with a keyboard integrated, ports in the back and a drive slot in the side. Since I never owned or even used big box Amigas, they feel more like PCs to me and does not hold the same nostalgic feeling (which is what this is all about).
If a standalone Vampire could be installed inside a real Amiga case and make it look and feel like a real Amiga, then I could probably see myself wanting one. Otherwise, I'd probably rather have the 1200 version since that will preserve the ports of the original MB (although the MB is degraded to not much more than a port replicator).

[E-Penguin]

It's really good to see the development of new hardware for the Amiga generally, and ultimately perhaps new volume produced m68k Amigas. It doesn't work for everyone, but neither does PPC.

[jbenam]

No floppy header? What were they thinking?

No Amiga is an Amiga without a floppy drive!

Looks like I'll be waiting for Vampire V5, which will come out in 6 months and will be adding a floppy header and 100 more euros to the price tag...

[TuKo]

Originally Posted by jbenam

No floppy header? What were they thinking?

No Amiga is an Amiga without a floppy drive!

IO headers are meant for that. You could have floppy, serial, etc. It's all up to developpers.