Vampire discourse, keep it civil (was: Vampire 1200 V2 waiting times)

[chucsmom69]

Trading standards or some other offical goverment body need to do something about apollo and there shady practices- surely enough is enough now!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by chucsmom69

Trading standards or some other offical goverment body need to do something about apollo and there shady practices- surely enough is enough now!

Good luck with that. Are we even sure that the 'core' is legal?

[Chucky]

and not a coldfire-fork?

https://community.nxp.com/t5/ColdFir...p/139988#M2259

https://community.nxp.com/t5/ColdFir...ing/m-p/238714

[chucsmom69]

Oooooohhhh thats certainly an eye opening read! Gunnar you seem to be a very naughty man indeed!

[Leon Besson]

So I’m guessing if you want something faster than a 68060 the Pi-Storm way is the way to go? Or will there be a gotcha with that too down the road?

[Chucky]

if you do not want a pure 060.. I guess pistorm is the way to go yes. and honestly most likly a more sustainable solution

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by Chucky

if you do not want a pure 060.. I guess pistorm is the way to go yes. and honestly most likly a more sustainable solution

Good to know Thanks.

[kipper2k]

So...
When i got screwed and left apollo i have in my possession 100 A600 V2 vampire boards designed by Igor as stated by grond that they are Igors that do not have any core in them so they can technically be disposed of however i deem fit unless Igor has strong reasons as they should not be disposed of. They would make good development boards and allow me to recover a ""LOT"" of money that i lost while my testicles were yanked from me!. If i get a ban for this post then it is fully worthwhile. People are used and abused by apollo until their usefulness is deemed negligible

[kipper2k]

sorry, i should have mentioned this for clarification about PCB design...



As you can read Igor owns PCB design. People can use his design and it woud be illegal to use apollo core on his design, so a public core would have to be used to keep the board legal

[NovaCoder]

Vampire/Apollo has definitely split the small Amiga classic community which is sad. If they'd just stuck to a simple 68k CPU replacement rather than trying to build a 'next generation Amiga' stand alone computer it would have been preferable.

[grelbfarlk]

Gunnar is just a narcissist. Over five years ago I watched the V2-A600 bringup by Majsta. Before Majsta it was just Gunnar lying about he had an FPGA replacement for the Amiga, "Does everyone forget the Natami?" Before Majsta it was just this forgotten never-was saying hey if someone will do the hard work of building a computer on an acccelerator, they will see that Natami wasn't a failed project! So Majsta built it. And we said where's the RTG support? Gunnar would constantly say AGA is done, LIKE THE NATAMI, DID YOU ALL FORGET? WE DON'T NEED RTG WE HAVE AGA LIKE THE NATAMI!
Again this was over five years ago. I could go on about what a liar and huxster Gunnar is but I don't really care.
I'm sorry for Majsta, he was genuinely trying to produce something useful for the Amigas. Oh also sorry for Kipper. Oh there was another Canadian which committed acts of blasphemy against Apollo too, I think it was... some french speaking Shark.

[Promilus]

Well it wasn't really "going back to where it all starts" so "amiga ng as it supposed to be". It was all about creating monopoly for Gunnar's "amiga spiritual legacy features". But he lacked hardware platform. He lacked it since Natami (and yes, there were some controversies in that team as well, would be nice to remember that). Then one day Igor appeared with Vampire "V1". It had too small FPGA but it was enough as proof of concept (amiga fpga based turbo). So after a while V2 came with bigger FPGA (and yes, I guess switch to bigger Cyclone III was forced by AC68080 requirements). Now when they got refined design they don't need him anymore. As for how legit core really is - well I wouldn't get down "coldfire" road as it's fundamentally different design but despite not using "HDMI" but "Digital Video" instead those cards use HDMI connectors and protocol. "Digital Video" might be a way to avoid implementing HDMI per standard (as a whole, so only some features relevant to amiga users) but it might be also an attempt to avoid legal issues and yes, to avoid paying royalties as well. Not the first one, not the last.

As for future of Apollo cards - well they do have some future. Not a very bright one with PiStorm with emu68 core (JIT). And while PiStorm has it's own problems to address nobody tries anyone to scam. It's a project based on different management principals and different business goals as well. It would be nice to see such FPGA open core development for new and existing fpga based turbo cards - as both alternative for those with "illegal cards" and as an active opposition to how Apollo Team treats their party members.

[Chucky]

And ironical that license is a issue. <cough>coffin<cough> <cough>HDMI<cough>

[grond]

Originally Posted by grond

Ok, sorry, I should feel embarrassed. I had only briefly looked at the pdf and then only at the table at the start of it. That seems to be the proposal from Gunnar and Miri for distributing the revenue resulting from V2 sales. The rest of it seems to be Igor's lengthy explanation as to why that offer is unacceptable to him. I will have to read it when I'm not on the phone.

OK, I have tried to read the pdf but I couldn't. Somewhere on page 3 I stopped paying attention. Obviously there are a lot of hurt feelings. I have seen more of Gunnar's style of communication than most and yes, he is hard to deal with and often hard to bear. However, Igor seems to overestimate the significance of his work by a far. His contributions to the core are close to zero if not nothing at all. He played around with interfacing the core to the Amiga bus, usually couldn't get it to work reliably and then Gunnar and Chris fixed stuff for him. During bring-up of the cards he did some copy-paste stuff of functional units. As to the PCBs, it took lots of revisions, lots of disregarded advice from experienced devs until they got where they are now. It is ridiculous to even imply anything in the V4 could be based on the V2 PCBs. The V2 has SDRAM, the V4 has DDR3. That's already about half of the complexity of the PCBs. The V4 PCBs were designed by Chris, the guy who -- using a lot of patience -- helped Igor make the V2s work. Even if Igor had made the entire PCB design himself, this still amounts to very little in comparison to the work that went into the CPU core. This is illustrated by the fact that there are many FPGA boards (most prominently the various V4s) but no alternative core that would get anywhere near in speed to that of the 080. Several people boasted they could do it but nothing ever saw the light of day. The mere fact that the core can't live without a PCB and the PCB doesn't do anything without the core doesn't mean that both parts are equal in significance. This can be illustrated easily:

Why not take tg68, debug it, make it fully 020 compatible and bring it up to speeds and sell that? Probably because the price of the cards would have to be competitive against 030 cards (that's about what you can get out of tg68, no FPU either) and the drop in price would have to be much more than what Gunnar and Miri want as their share.

Igor also talks a lot about money that went to Gunnar but curiously is very
silent about the amount of money that stayed with him. If the BOM was about 70€ and 50€ were paid to Gunnar, that leaves an enormous amount to Igor. Igor questions whether Gunnar actually parted with some of the money he received and gave anything to other team members but why should Igor be those people' lawyer? What money did he pay to those contributors? I got the following gifts from Gunnar and Miri: two Vampire-branded game controllers, a Vampire-branded mouse-mat, a large discount on my V4 (I paid the full price to Igor for my V600 and my V1200, though), a Vampire-branded cap, a Vampire-branded jacket. I know that similar gifts went to the other team members. For all I know money from card sales is also used to fund attendence of team members at Amiga conventions.

Obviously a lot of this is about money. Money from a joint project needs to be shared and then emotions come into play because each side feels that the amount of money they get should somehow reflect their importance.

However, another factor is that Igor took forever to manufacture cards. He wasted a whole year on constructing a pick-and-place-machine because he wanted to turn his home into a PCB solder house (didn't work out). During all this time not a single V2 was built and sold. He resisted the idea of having the V2 PCBs produced by a professional solder house for years. All this resulted in a very low output of cards and many lost customers. The V4-stand-alone was designed to also work in A500/A1000/A2000 computers and this was to be understood as a threat: get your production running or we will produce accelerator cards ourselves. Just ask yourself: when was it publically stated that Igor retired from the team? How long did it take Igor to now get the next batch of V2 cards into the shops and onto Ebay which got Gunnar to react and resulted in this most recent communication from Igor? One year? Two? Eventually time was up and the V4 series were sold.

Another thing to think about: why should a one-off payment for a core license somehow guarantee that there would be core updates? And over what period of time? Forever? From a customer's point of view that would be desirable but Igor is out of the deal pretty much the moment he sold the card (yes, he is ace in honouring warranty!).

In the above I take very much Gunnar's side but I do this to add some perspective to this discussion that has all the usual Vampire-haters. It certainly isn't all black and white and not a movie with good guys and bad guys. It's about money and pride and a lot of BS coming from that. You can make this a very complicated thing or a very simple thing: do you want to buy the product for the price, yes or no? No need to make it any more complicated than that. Personally I am very happy with the V1200, my latest revision V600 and my V4SA. The V1200 does not give me much desire to make the step to the Icedrake (also considering the price tag). And that's really all that is my business.

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by grond

OK, I have tried to read the pdf but I couldn't. Somewhere on page 3 I stopped paying attention.

I tried reading the rest of your comment but I couldn't. Somewhere around line 5 I stopped paying attention

[jbenam]

IMHO, everything made for a very-dead-and-over-30-year-old computer should be open source. Then we wouldn't even have these discussions. Instead of scattering effort and mind-share we could all be benefiting from it, but no, there's money to be made out of this, and profit always comes first.

Not sure much how of that money you can still spill from the very "desperate" (it seems that accelerators are never enough, no matter how many of them are being produced and sold right now) Amiga community but evidently it's enough to keep stuff closed source and give us plenty of drama.

And well, at least that's something that the Amiga community never ceased to produce enough of - we always had enough drama for everyone and then some more

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by jbenam

we always had enough drama for everyone and then some more

If only there was a way to market it

I present to you the ShitStorm accelerator for your Amiga, powered by CommunityDrama™

[daxb]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

I tried reading the rest of your comment but I couldn't. Somewhere around line 5 I stopped paying attention

Yes, funny. However, I stopped reading at paragraph 2 of the comment.

[lmimmfn]

Honestly grond that's a very strange post, without going into everything you posted regarding updates and "why should a one-off payment for a core license somehow guarantee that there would be core updates?" - what is wrong with customers expecting that? If I buy something that doesn't work I expect to get support to make it work, Switchblade 2 is still bugged along with many other games/demo's, are customers expected to buy a product with no compatibility improvements, do apollo specifically state what won't run/is incompatible and state this will never be improved(or requiring payment to fix their current broken compatibility) so customers can make an informed decision?

I also don't understand how you keep reading the doc incorrectly, Igor got 172 euro per card, Gunnar/miri got 142 euro per card and Apollo got 82 euro per card, all that is without VAT. Igor's share included the cost of physical card including 30 euro for card development.
This is the 3rd time I'm conveying info from the document but you're still not understanding it? I don't understand, the document and info is plain and simple to understand?

Longterm I agree that Igor producing the cards was unsustainable however his work contributed to the release of an actual solution, him producing the PCB, Gunnar producing the Core. The solution would not exist with both of those contributions, just because Gunnar decides Igor is irrelevant now and Apollo have his previous PCB designs which helped the current V4 designs does not take away from his contribution. If it was me I would have sued Gunnars ass.

Apollo have to be the worst company in the Amiga world outside of the legal nonsense regarding AmigaOS, they consistently keep burning customers with their team shenanigans, turning customers off anything they produce because we can't be bothered with their internal shit or their shit treatment of customers in general(banning from forum on the slightest disagreement, the forum, discord and newly their store are the only options for customer support).
This along with their throughput of team members obviously shows they're a monkey outfit.

Personally I don't care for Apollo or their nonsense, I'll never support them or their products in future, they're just another stain on the Amiga name.

*EDIT* also I see Gunnar has changed his tune regarding cards sold through resellers(his post had several stealth edits)
"If you need help, or have any question always contact us.
As support email I would propose to use :: shop@apollo-computer.com To contact us email is good or Discord also a good contact option.
If you are already a vampire /apollo user then you are probably on our Discord support channel already?

Contact us and we show you how to read out your card ID and we can immediately tell you the status of your card.

As said there are several options for you to get this cleared.

For us the customer are most important.
Always come to us if you need help, or have questions.
Come and we will help you and we will find a way to solve this for you.

Of course you can also always go to your seller.

In case that you bought directly from Igor.
Asas he sold you with full price and if you got no licence, this then means you overpaid.
I think that you can ask for refund or to get a license.
Also there might be the option to open a paypal case and get money back.

In case you consider to upgrade to a V4, please contact the shop and discuss the options for this. You might get a good offer."
http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=38690

Which at least is better for customers(and took a while for them to actually change their tune) but will give them that at least.

[S0ulA55a551n]

Strange. As a customer I couldn't give two shits about who is "right" or "wrong" etc etc.

A lot of Vampire users have been treated badly one way or another. Why should the end users be concerned with all this bullshit. Terrible communication, lack of support, infighting and often aggressive replies to requests for help or pointing out issues.

Could have been a decent product. Fucking awful people behind it. And I really don't care who any of the people involved think is to blame.

I am also not interested in some peoples assertion that there are decent people involved, might be the case, but they are all tainted.

Ultimately it is the customers who have suffered.