The Vampire II has had a GOLD3 core ALPHA released!

[nexus]

its real as it was made by the company who design the core
and you must be joking on the money part lol

[demolition]

Originally Posted by nexus

its real as it was made by the company who design the core
and you must be joking on the money part lol

They never claimed that the Apollo core was a true 68000. It is a new generation of cores which is compatible to 68000/020/etc.


And no, I am definitely not joking. If they had to pay even minimum wages to themselves, the Vampires would be a lot more expensive. So much that hardly anyone would buy it.

[nexus]

i know for a fact the money thing is nonsense you speak of please stop telling lies are you paid or something by them?
maybe getting free hardware?
doubt you answer that honestly anyways if it is true

and yes i know they are using the amiga community to beta test a core which they will try and sell to other companies to profit
at least thats the plan im sure which the community will never get to use

you seem to like selling this character of them that they are just amiga fans doing it for the community for no profit
that is a joke
if that was true then this be opensource which it isnt and never will be cause they dont want others to what? profit or steal sales from them

talk about vamp and what it can cant do etc but dont sit here and sell me BS like that
it isnt even relevant to this topic

[demolition]

Originally Posted by nexus

i know for a fact the money thing is nonsense you speak of please stop telling lies are you paid or something by them?

Yeah, I'm thinking about getting my driveway paved with gold from all the money I'm receiving from them.


If they managed to sell the core to some other project and make a decent profit from it, why would that be a problem? They put their time into it, so they are the ones who should get the rewards if there are any. What really matters to me as a buyer/user is that I get a nice piece of hardware for a competitive price. The alternative would be a 060 accelerator with an RTG card which is not only old and more expensive but also slower and very hard to find for A500/A600..

[grond]

Originally Posted by nexus

i know for a fact the money thing is nonsense

You know that for a fact? Then it is easy to prove your point: just let us have those facts or shut up.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by nexus

they are getting paid by making hardware updates are fixing a lot of whats wrong with it and they get to have free testing to correct there mistakes and also used towards selling new hardware in next revisions everyone is a beta tester for this project that reports what works and what doesnt...

they are not selling at cost price lol not even close

My first Amiga was an A1000, which came with Kickstart 1.1 on disk because it wasn't stable enough to be put into ROM. So all of us A1000 owners were unwitting 'beta testers' for Commodore, providing them with free testing to correct their mistakes and also used towards selling new hardware in next revisions.

My A1000 cost me the equivalent of NZ$6000 in today's money, so they were not selling at cost price lol not even close (unless you count development costs...). Then a few years later I bought an A3000 which cost the equivalent of NZ$12000. Man was I a sucker!

In comparison the price I just paid for a second-hand A600 in pristine condition (NZ$270) and Vampire 600 V2 ($NZ650) was peanuts. Factor in the vastly increased processing power, 128MB RAM and built in RTG, and the Vampire is an incredible bargain. If the manufacturer and vendors are making some money out of it then even better - maybe they won't throw in the towel like Commodore did in 1994 (taking away my business's reason for existence and forcing me to sell crappy PCs for a living).

before power on the FPGA is blank till some software tells it how to configure its special hardware inside to act like something else whatever that may be

So what? Before power-on the A1000's Writable Control Store is blank until some software loads data into it and configures its special hardware inside to act like a ROM. Not that much different...

The image below is part of an A1000 motherboard, showing the two PAL (Programmable Array Logic) chips that control the WCS daughterboard. These particular PALs contain around 1000 gates and a matrix of 2048 fuses to configure them. When manufactured they are blank and do nothing, but once programmed they effectively become ASICs.

PALs were great for 'emulating' hard wired logic, especially if you hadn't finalized the design yet and weren't sure exactly what logic you need. But they can't be reprogrammed, so if you needed to change the configuration you had to throw the chip away and 'blow' a new one. To get around this GAL (Generic Array Logic) chips were developed. 'Generic' means that one GAL type can be configured to 'emulate' many different PAL types. Instead of metallic links they have EEPROM style 'fuses' which can be erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times.

The next step was to increase the number of gates with CPLDs (which are like several GALs bolted together), and finally with FPGAs which have volatile configuration switches that must be loaded each time the chip is powered up. Some FPGAs have internal configuration ROM, which makes them externally equivalent to a CPLD except for the longer 'bootup' time. FPGAs often also have dedicated devices in them such as RAM or a CPU, to save wasting gates 'emulating' these common functions.

Despite the huge increase in functionality between a GAL with a few hundred gates and an FPGA with several hundred thousand gates, the principle is the same - a chip whose logic is 'blank' until configured. This technique was used even in the very first Amiga design, so if programmable logic only 'emulates' parts of the machine then there never was a 'real' Amiga!

[E-Penguin]

1. People bandy about accusations of "emulation" as if that's necessarily a Bad Thing, yet more than likely have fs-uae or winuae installed somewhere. Emulation is a good thing and the Amiga scene would be poorer without it.

2. FPGA is a hardware implementation, and the difference to emulation is in the parallel execution inherent to all hardware logic. You can't do that in software which is always serial in nature (even if multi-threaded, which is just a handful of serial processes). We use FPGAs at work a lot because it's cheaper to space quality an FPGA once and implement the functions in that (CPU, etc) rather than build and space qualify a new ASIC each time. You'd get short thrift from some of the world's best hardware engineers if you started calling the spacecraft avionics "emulation".

I've not yet had a chance to try gold 3 alpha but I look forward to having a go once I have my A600 fixed.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

You'd get short thrift from some of the world's best hardware engineers if you started calling the spacecraft avionics "emulation".

Those modern avionics can be used to navigate a spacecraft to the moon, thus they must be emulating the Apollo Guidance Computer.


But no point in trying to explain what FPGAs are and how they differ from what people usually think of when you mention 'emulation'. This has been covered numerous times in countless threads, and if people still don't get it by now it's because they don't want to.

[nexus]

or maybe you just refuse to admit that they are emulating and everyone else is correct
maybe you are in denial
guess they arent emulating other amiga chipsets either

but by your responses you must be paid to post this stuff for them

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by nexus

in the end your real amiga is just a keyboard as everything is happening on that PCB not just a CPU

Well hopefully not everything, because there's still a floppy drive, serial and parallel ports etc. to consider.

The idea of reproducing AGA graphics on the Vampire board is clever, but I imagine integrating it with other motherboard functions could be very tricky. If they can pull it off then this will the first time that anyone has managed to make a true AGA upgrade for OCS/ECS Amigas (there were rumors of such a thing back when AGA first came out, but of course it never materialized - until now!).

But even if they can't manage full compatibility it still solves the problem of needing two video connections to view both native Amiga screens and RTG. It eliminates the need for a second monitor that can do 15kHz, or an expensive flicker fixer or frame-lagging upscaler, or having to use blurry composite output. No more getting annoyed by delays and messages popping up on the screen when you switch video inputs, or worrying about programs that refuse to play nice on RTG screens.

Considering the shocking price of a good flicker fixer and the scarcity of 15KHz RGB monitors, getting all this for free (if you already have a Vampire) is amazing!

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by demolition

if people still don't get it by now it's because they don't want to.

I see what you mean.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by nexus

or maybe you just refuse to admit that they are emulating and everyone else is correct
maybe you are in denial
guess they arent emulating other amiga chipsets either

but by your responses you must be paid to post this stuff for them

Or maybe they are just happy about having some new Amiga hardware that does some cool new tricks.

Cool down, dude.

This is some people building an add on for 30 years old crappy tech.
You won't get hurt if somebody buys and has fun with this.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Steril707

You won't get hurt if somebody buys and has fun with this.

I wouldn't be so sure about that - it sounds like he is in pain..

[MickGyver]

Originally Posted by xanderbeanz

I don’t want to get into an argument on the Internet, but it’s commonly understood that FPGA is not emulation, which is the clever use of software to mimic a hardware system.

FPGA is the constant reconfiguration of a highly configurable chip, it actually physically“becomes” the hardware, and behaves in exactly the same way with the same physical connections.

Originally Posted by Dunny

I always understood emulation to be a piece of software that executes code from another architecture by translating instructions from that software into instructions for the host to execute, trapping or redirecting things like memory or i/o accesses to provide visual/auditory feedback or grant access to files (such as floppy or hard disk images) on the host system's storage.

The FPGA is not an emulator, as there is no host running translation software.

Now you can argue that it's not an Amiga because it doesn't run a recognised 68k architecture until the cows come home - I've not seen anyone on here yet pin down what is and isn't an Amiga as the definition varies from person to person. But it's most certainly not an emulation.

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

1. People bandy about accusations of "emulation" as if that's necessarily a Bad Thing, yet more than likely have fs-uae or winuae installed somewhere. Emulation is a good thing and the Amiga scene would be poorer without it.

2. FPGA is a hardware implementation, and the difference to emulation is in the parallel execution inherent to all hardware logic. You can't do that in software which is always serial in nature (even if multi-threaded, which is just a handful of serial processes). We use FPGAs at work a lot because it's cheaper to space quality an FPGA once and implement the functions in that (CPU, etc) rather than build and space qualify a new ASIC each time. You'd get short thrift from some of the world's best hardware engineers if you started calling the spacecraft avionics "emulation".

Originally Posted by demolition

But no point in trying to explain what FPGAs are and how they differ from what people usually think of when you mention 'emulation'. This has been covered numerous times in countless threads, and if people still don't get it by now it's because they don't want to.

Originally Posted by nexus

or maybe you just refuse to admit that they are emulating and everyone else is correct

From what I understand, an FPGA implementation is hardware emulation whereas WinUAE etc. is software emulation. Generally when we talk about emulation we are talking about software emulation. The 68080 can be considered a real processor that doesn't have an ASIC version, instead it is implemented using an FPGA (hardware emulation).

In my opinion it doesn't matter what you call it but what I value with any kind of system emulating older hardware is that as little as possible "gets in the way", so to speak. Software emulation is great but can be a hassle to deal with and all the extra stuff you see (other OS, emulator menus etc.) takes away from the experience. Input lag is also something that software emulation suffers from, you might not directly notice it but it's there and games may not just feel fun (WinUAE is very good when it comes to input lag though).

The Vampire is nice since it improves existing Amigas but keeps the experience intact. But, until recently I thought that everything was output through HDMI and I was surprised that this wasn't the case. I think for the price people pay for Vampires they deserve the functionality of the new core, it shouldn't be considered a "free" update, instead I think it's an essential update.

[grond]

The 080 is no emulation because it does not try to mimic any other processor, it is a new 68k compatible processor that improves on many aspects of Motorola's series of 68k processors. It is merely implemented in an FPGA because an ASIC is not feasible economically.

I have a feeling that a certain person who "knows for a fact" that money can/could be made off Vampires is a little grudged because the core is tied to the unique serial numbers of the Vampires which bars a little cloning business...

[Glen M]

OK heres my dumb understanding of FPGA:

Any chip at its base level is essentially just a collection of gates. Be that a 68k, paula, agnus, whatever. These gates all come together to carry out the job of a processor, audio, blitter, whatever. An FPGA is a chip filled with gates that can be programmed to carry out an operation. I don't know the numbers and I can't be bothered to look but lets for example say the 68k has 100 gates and the rest of the chipset combined has 150. If the FPGA has a programmable 300 gates then it can easily hold the full computer in there with space to spare for say an FPU?

Now I know in reality the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands if not millions (chip design is a tad over my head) but the principal remains. Take existing chips and recreate them in the FPGA. The FPGA is not emulation. It is the original hardware recreated inside 1 package. There is always going to be bugs that need fixing so actually an FPGA is actually the best method of recreating the Amiga hardware. Rather than making a chip that would need to be physically revised each time the FPGA can just be reprogrammed. I wouldn't be surprised actually that when they finish the FPGA design and work out all the bugs that they don't ditch it and move to a finished chip.

Anyway, my names been down for months now and I've not heard a bean. Does anyone here know what the timeframe is for V500 interest to orders?

[E-Penguin]

If a chip executes an instruction natively it isn't emulation, hardware or otherwise. AMD x86 chips aren't emulating Intel processors, although they no doubt implement the instructions slightly differently internally. That said, modern processors make extensive use of microcode rather than direct execution so you could claim they're hardware emulators...

As an RTG card, fast memory upgrade and fast 68k-compatible processor, the vampire is good value already.

[nexus]

Originally Posted by grond

The 080 is no emulation because it does not try to mimic any other processor, it is a new 68k compatible processor that improves on many aspects of Motorola's series of 68k processors. It is merely implemented in an FPGA because an ASIC is not feasible economically.

I have a feeling that a certain person who "knows for a fact" that money can/could be made off Vampires is a little grudged because the core is tied to the unique serial numbers of the Vampires which bars a little cloning business...

are you saying im trying to steal a unfinished broken design now?
you trolls i swear make up all kinds of crap to sell your goods
none here in USA are cloning any vampire boards lol

but we all know you cant trust a lawyers word they are paid to lie

[Aladin]

a lot of frustrated here

[demolition]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

If a chip executes an instruction natively it isn't emulation, hardware or otherwise. AMD x86 chips aren't emulating Intel processors

That is purely a question of how you define the word 'emulation'. Not everybody shares the same definition of the word, thus it is a never-ending debate.

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emulation:

History and Etymology for Emulation
borrowed from Latin aemul?ti?n-, aemul?ti?, from aemul?r? "to vie with, rival, imitate"

So while I think that most people would agree that the 68080 is clearly very different from running a software emulator like UAE, it can still be argued that it emulates the earlier 680x0 CPUs since it can run most of the code designed for those. But if the 68080 emulates an 68000, then that also applies to the genuine 68060. Whether it is an FPGA or ASIC is not relevant.
The 68080 was not designed to be a reimplementation of a any specific 680x0 CPU. It is a new generation of CPU core which is designed to be as compatible as possible with code written for those older generations of CPUs.