Looking forward to the Vampire 4?

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Welshieinnz

Dude, seriously. Enough.

I know people who are disappointed with Vampire, and by chance here are all satisfied without even knowing it, if one is not happy with Amikit, let me not be for Vampire.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Gorf

So I am incompetent and not qualified ... thanx

I did not say this, you said you do not have a Windows PC, I have a dozen Windows PCs, and I can assure you that the AfA-OS performances on WinUAE increase with the most powerful PCs and slow down dramatically with less powerful PCs. Also the video card and quality sound card make the difference on performance (see my video on MP3s).

[DamienD]

Carlo; enough please.

If the guys want to purchase a vampire and discuss their excitement then let them be.

Just ignore this thread as I do due to having no interest in Vampire products...

[Amicol]

I initially loved the idea of Vampire 'accelerator' but started to feel it was a 'step too far'. It's replacing the computer rather than enhancing it.

Really wish someone would do a version that is an accelerator/memory and fast SD interface only. The old Motorola chips are getting a bit 'long in the tooth' and a faster replacement would be welcome.

Don't get me wrong Vampire accelerator fans, I used to feel the same as you. But over time I've changed my mind and rather appreciate the original hardware.

However, I may be tempted to buy a 'stand alone' version to compliment my collection. A totally new Amiga rather than a 'Body Snatcher'

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

You missed a detail, on the Vampire there is a low resolution grainy, in my video Quake 2 has a resolution 1024x768 (you can go further) with the maximum detail, look at it well

Why should I go for an emulation layer playing a twenty years old game on my Windows PC , if I can play it directly without starting the emulator?

And yeah, I am looking forward to more Amiga hardware, whether it's the Vampire or Jens future 68060 cards he is currently developing its seems.

And I love (FS-)UAE, since that's where i am doing my cross dev on.

Why do you people need to do a pissing contest, we should be happy to have all these options.

[LooZee]

Originally Posted by Amicol

Really wish someone would do a version that is an accelerator/memory and fast SD interface only. The old Motorola chips are getting a bit 'long in the tooth' and a faster replacement would be welcome.

That is great until someone comes along and says "the old OCS/ECS/AGA chips are getting a bit long in the tooth and a faster replacement would be welcome".

The Amiga had all kinds of hardware replacements and enhancements. Every little PCB you plug onto one of your custom chips is one step away from a real Amiga.

If they would split the Vampire into 5 different boards, CPU, graphics, audio, IDE, SD. You would buy all 5 of them, wouldn't you?

What's wrong with a much less expensive all-in-one solution? After years of reading threads like this one I still have to see an answer to this question. It usually boils down to "I don't want a Vampire for whatever reason that is none of your business, but I want everybody to know that I hate it."

[Amicol]

I actually like the Vampire, as a stand alone computer

For my 'classic' Amiga, I just want a cheap/fast accelerator. Maybe long in the tooth is the wrong word, as you say all the chips in the Amiga fall into this category. The Motorola 680x0 family of chips are not custom Amiga chips and therefore, in my opinion, fair game for replacement/upgrade. They are, however, now becoming rare and therefore expensive (prohibitively so these days). A FPGA implementation of just these chip's would be very welcome in my opinion (a card with a 68080, fast RAM, RTC & an SD card interface would be a dream come true for me!)

I also agree that any development for the Amiga is welcome. We're soooo luck to have ANYTHING new 30 odd years after the Amiga was released!

Power to the Vampire team, and any other's developing Amiga stuff, keep up the great work chaps

[Seiya]

Vampire exists from many years, but actually there is no software that exploits this hardware. So the problem is not to have hardware, but to have software that can be used with satisfaction with these new hardware.
You spend much money for Vampire to run 20/30 years software and so, now it's crazy this solution.
And there only interests to produce more hardware pieces, but no softwares for these cards.

So now what you can run with this hardware? Mpeg1 movie with Riva and browsing internet?
Mpeg1 is old format now abandoned from alls and internet require powerful browser than lacking on amiga. Odyssey, NetSurf could be good, but very far from "Internet".

[Aladin]

???
opentyrian, minislug, zelda, cave story, ...
emulator snes, mame, ...
netsurf, milkytracker, grafx2, ...
openbor, exult, ...

real ide, usb, rtg, ahi, 080, fast memory, ethernet, ...

[Tigerskunk]

Also, if you feel there is something missing, create it yourself...
Like people did back in the day with their Amigas.

That was like the whole thing about even owning a homecomputer back then.

Learn coding Intuition software, Assembler, start creating music in protracker, pixel stuff in DPaint.

[Ledfoot]

First off, Vampire is NOT emulation. Period. Anyone who thinks it is doesn’t understand what FPGA is.

It also has nothing to do with UAE. UAE is fine and I’ve used it, but I also really want to use a real Amiga and to me the V4 is the next generation Amiga we never got.

As far as software - if they can get enough of them out in great enough numbers I could certainly see developer writing for the 080 cpu, AMMX and the enhanced graphics modes afforded by the V4. Yeah it’ll break backwards compatibility but some software would really take advantage of those features (like a web browser for instance).

I just got a V2 for an old A500 and it’s pretty awesome with core 2.11. It is still using all the chips on the board. When V3 core comes it’ll bypass them all and provide aga and RTG support to an A500! Yeah I can see where some people would find that offputting but for those with old OCS/ECS machines, it breathes new life and opportunities to those rigs.

If you would rather use UAE - fine by all means do so. But some of us would like actual hardware to run on dedicated for our Amiga-ing.

And yeah my hope is that the V4 is such a success that they can come out with an ASIC version at much higher clockspeeds down the line. But we will need the software to catch up with that to really make it worthwhile.

Also, yes they are very far behind their initial estimates, but all the recent videos of the V4 undergoing testing, as well as their end of the year status post really makes it sound like we are probably only a few months away now. Most stuff is working right now. Ethernet, ide, SAGA, basic USB mouse and keyboard support, etc. There’s a few more things they have to finish up but based on the progress they’ve posted I doubt it’s going to be super long.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Seiya

You spend much money for Vampire to run 20/30 years software and so, now it's crazy this solution.

You run Amiga software.
Same as you do on a real Amiga (just faster) or on UAE.
That is the whole point!

And there IS newer software - even the Kickstart got an update

And there only interests to produce more hardware pieces, but no softwares for these cards.

There are some special versions for the Vampire - and that is something I do not even like: Amiga software should run on all Amigas not just on a certain accelerator.
So why do you want special software for the Vampire?

[puppypc]

Seiya, you need to understand that the custom Amiga chips have not been produced in over 20 years. it's improbable that they will ever be reproduced, because of how expensive it is to do a bunch of ASIC runs (paula, agnus/alice, denise/lisa, gary/gayle, buster/budgie), not to mention any legal issues that always surface around this scene.

The current method of creating new, non-FPGA Amigas is to scavenge these chips from old dead (or worse, functioning) machines. Anyone can see that the price for old computers in general has risen over the years. These chips can only get more rare.

FPGA is the most cost effective way of producing more Amiga Custom Chips, and in theory it is a 1-to-1 copy of the original ASICs. I have two machines that are around 30 years old and I love using them, but new hardware has a longer life expectancy, and I'd love a new machine that I can expect to still run 20 years from now.

Will I use it to run 20-30 year old software? absolutely, because it's a lot cheaper than a fully-tricked out A1200.

[ferrellsl]

Originally Posted by Amicol

I initially loved the idea of Vampire 'accelerator' but started to feel it was a 'step too far'. It's replacing the computer rather than enhancing it.

Really wish someone would do a version that is an accelerator/memory and fast SD interface only. The old Motorola chips are getting a bit 'long in the tooth' and a faster replacement would be welcome.

Don't get me wrong Vampire accelerator fans, I used to feel the same as you. But over time I've changed my mind and rather appreciate the original hardware.

However, I may be tempted to buy a 'stand alone' version to compliment my collection. A totally new Amiga rather than a 'Body Snatcher'

Replacing it how? Are Vampires showing up in the dark of night and taking the place of your original Amiga? You still have your original Amiga and no one is forcing you to buy a Vampire OR to get rid of your original hardware, so what point are you failing to make?

[coder76]

There are a certain number of flaws in the Vampire design, which also the designers don't seem to care much about. The Vampire system should run easily without operating system services, like old Amigas. But with USB keyboards and mice, these drop dead when OS is turned off (nothing strange here). And good luck with implementing your own USB stack, the old Amiga keyboard and mouse needed around 100 lines of assembler code to handle both keyboard and mouse.

Also poor integration of PCMCIA hardware in A1200s by Commodore and the general complexity of ethernet hardware prevented us from having games using ethernet hardware. With serial/parallell link the code needed to handle the connection is a few tens of lines of assembler code, while ethernet driver is maybe 150 kB of assembler source code.

[Amicol]

Seems to me that you Amiga is just a Keyboard with this installed. A bit of a waste of good custom chips IMO.

That's why I would buy it as a stand alone. Then yes, I'll have both old and new

Again, I support the Vampire project. Think it's an amazing piece of hardware.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by coder76

And good luck with implementing your own USB stack, the old Amiga keyboard and mouse needed around 100 lines of assembler code to handle both keyboard and mouse.

On a built in Vampire this is not changed.
On the standalone version, the solution is supposed to be transparent, meaning from the Amiga-side it just looks like any old keyboard/mouse/joystick.
(that is the reason why the need a usb-stack in FPGA in the first place)

Also poor integration of PCMCIA hardware in A1200s by Commodore and the general complexity ....

relevancy?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amicol

Seems to me that you Amiga is just a Keyboard with this installed. A bit of a waste of good custom chips IMO.

that depends on the "core" you are running. With 2.x you are still using all your custom chips as before.
With 3.x it will emulate the AGA chipset as well - keypoad, mouse, joysticks, serial and parallel (and expansions) are still handelt by the original hardware

That's why I would buy it as a stand alone. Then yes, I'll have both old and new

or just new... depends how you look at it.

[Amicol]

@Gorf

Thanks for that info and constructive post. So you can turn off features and run the card as an accelerator?

Interesting. You may have rekindled my interest.

[coder76]

Originally Posted by Gorf

On a built in Vampire this is not changed.
On the standalone version, the solution is supposed to be transparent, meaning from the Amiga-side it just looks like any old keyboard/mouse/joystick.
(that is the reason why the need a usb-stack in FPGA in the first place)



relevancy?

Well, the relevancy is here that modern hardware is pretty ugly. One needs to focus on cutting down complexity, and not using too much existing solutions. Especially not having new hardware which requires a lot of code to handle. This USB is no ideal thing to have for mouse and keyboard, a USB interface is designed to handle a wide variety of input devices, and is by design complicated. But yeah, I can understand the use for it, but can't yet see how well it is going to work in practice.

One other thing that bothered me in Vampire is the use of CPU to emulate blitter function, because they haven't implemented a blitter in FPGA. So, no parallell use of CPU and blitter, which would otherwise increase performance.