Vampire/SAGA support

[jbenam]

SAGA is just another standard which doesn't solve anything and just keeps fragmenting the userbase. Just like 68080 is. We now have soft-cores running at hundreds of MIPS. Without any new instruction sets and/or the need to recompile old apps.

The Vampire is just Gunnar's delusional view of how the Amiga would've evolved under his guidance - he doesn't accept criticism and/or different views than him, and the current Apollo Team is kinda like a religious cult and Gunnar is their leader. Instead of gathering the support of the major developers out there, they have alienated them with their lack of openness and willingness to compromise their original view.

WinUAE allows any programmer to target fast 68000 compatible soft-cores + RTG without fragmenting the userbase any further. There are plenty of high-end Amigas out there, the PiStorm is cheap as chips and will bring high-end Amigas to everyone and that's how the Amiga community should work in 2021. Not with weird agendas of pushing expensive proprietary hardware with proprietary extensions.

The Vampire is a dead end. Let it rot in a coffin

[Thomas Richter]

P96 is a software interface for RTG hardware, how the hardware operates does not matter provided there is a driver for it. P96 supports chunky and planar layouts. It's specifications are stable since a very long time, dating back to times where Amiga had still some market penetration, and it manages a variety of hardware solutions.

SAGA is a proprietary hardware/register interface that does not follow any existing solutions. That does not exclude that P96 may drive it if a driver exists, of course. It is an interface on a much lower level, and with a much smaller target.

IOWs, by using the software interface layer like P96, you have a wider platform as the software will then work on any existing RTG hardware, though the interface is necessarily the common denominator of several hardware solutions. With SAGA, you solely depend on the will of its creator - who has shown that he doesn't care about existing specs like AutoConf, the F-BootRom or the MMU.

[grond]

Originally Posted by jbenam

the current Apollo Team is kinda like a religious cult and Gunnar is their leader.

This seems much more true about the Holy Spanish Inquisition that is always out to impale any Vampires around... a religious cult.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

With SAGA, you solely depend on the will of its creator - who has shown that he doesn't care about existing specs like AutoConf, the F-BootRom or the MMU.

And that's my major gripe with the Vampire.

Standards are there, they have existed for a long time and are proven and time-tested after decades of use - but they don't want to use them because they have an insufferable case of "not invented here"-itis. Which is totally unacceptable in an already fragmented niche like the Amiga.

[daxb]

Originally Posted by clebin

The big point is it's also open-source. So there's nothing to stop SAGA support on Pistorm, or Buffee, Win/FS-UAE, ZZ9000 type cards, Minimig AGA, or anything else.

As far as I know SAGA, which is part of the Apollo Core, isn't open source but if so it wouldn't change anything or much. Thinks maybe would change if you bring Apollo hardware to nearly all Amiga users and at least all developers.

[kriz]

You do not need to use any of the new saga features, I use my vampire as a standard acc. card with gfx card included... Works very well and the best solution that is available for a desktop Amiga ...

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by clebin

Hardware vs software doesn't really matter here - it's a product and a specification that people may or may not adopt.

It does matter.

Originally Posted by clebin

As I say, you could use SAGA to progressively enhance an AGA release with extra features like a pretty parallax background or whatever.

SAGA did not enhance anything, just make mess with new "standard".

Originally Posted by clebin

Writing for RTG makes your game useless for stock Amigas. Lots of people get upset about that too. Amiga users are world champions at getting upset about stuff.

Same could be said for SAGA. But RTG is rather more popular solution than SAGA, so more people could be not satisfied.

Originally Posted by clebin

The big point is it's also open-source.

SAGA is open-source? Since when?

Originally Posted by clebin

So there's nothing to stop SAGA support on Pistorm, or Buffee, Win/FS-UAE, ZZ9000 type cards, Minimig AGA, or anything else. At that point you couldn't say that SAGA is just for Vampire cards.

Do You like Nazareth band? There is one song which perfectly fits...

Originally Posted by clebin

But that may never happen and the reason is your point about not having a stable base to work from.

Stable probably as ship during storm. SAGA specification can be completely changed in meantime, when creator get fancy mood to this.

Originally Posted by clebin

I don't know what the current state of SAGA is in that regard or what assurances are in place, but it's a big problem for SAGA. We're in complete agreement on that.

It's in state [UNDER CONSTRUCTION].

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by grond

This seems much more true about the Holy Spanish Inquisition that is always out to impale any Vampires around... a religious cult.

This seems to be the general trend, any small opinion based disagreement creates a huge divide. I can understand both camps and also think there is common ground; Amiga.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

SAGA did not enhance anything, just make mess with new "standard".

Oh, 'cmon, it certainly does as it provides chunky modes. That's all fine with me.

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

Same could be said for SAGA. But RTG is rather more popular solution than SAGA, so more people could be not satisfied.

Well, you're not comparing the right things here. RTG is a software interface layer, and as such, SAGA can satisfy it. It actually does. However, SAGA is a hardware interface. You cannot really compare a hardware with a software interface layer.



However, let's compare the hardware for a while: for other Amiga extensions, you can query the expansion.library, and load the appropriate driver for it. For SAGA - not. You need some proprietary logic to detect it, which may or may not change. So one of the beaties of AmigaOs goes away - scalability.



P5 hardware had exactly the same issues. You did not know how it operated, you did not know how to detect it, and it was not compatible to anything else. It required proprietary tools to run it and maintain it, and its author was bad in communication.



History repeats, apparently.

[UberFreak]

Originally Posted by kriz

You do not need to use any of the new saga features, I use my vampire as a standard acc. card with gfx card included... Works very well and the best solution that is available for a desktop Amiga ...

This.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by modrobert

This seems to be the general trend, any small opinion based disagreement creates a huge divide. I can understand both camps and also think there is common ground; Amiga.

Burn the witch!

[Thomas Richter]

Unless you need some debug tools for development, in which case only the Vampire-specific toolchain will do. Generic tools won't.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by daxb

As far as I know SAGA, which is part of the Apollo Core, isn't open source but if so it wouldn't change anything or much. Thinks maybe would change if you bring Apollo hardware to nearly all Amiga users and at least all developers.

Gunnar announced it but maybe it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully they want to address the issues raised here by releasing it only when it's considered final. That would make sense rather than reinforce people's perception of the project as a moving target.

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=5768

EDIT: Wow, that post was from 2017. I didn't think it had been that long.

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Oh, 'cmon, it certainly does as it provides chunky modes. That's all fine with me.

Is that useful for users of OCS/ECS/AGA or other cards supported by RTG (CGX/P96)? If not, that's "mess" which i mentioned - doing one more "standard", moreover not compatible with any other.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Well, you're not comparing the right things here. RTG is a software interface layer, and as such, SAGA can satisfy it. It actually does. However, SAGA is a hardware interface. You cannot really compare a hardware with a software interface layer.

I know that SAGA is hardware (not fully, but well) and RTG is software, please mind that I was explaining it to Clebin. I'm comparing groups of users. Yes, it can be done - which is bigger userbase, RTG software or SAGA hardware. And that's what I mean in this case, including that SAGA have RTG drivers.

[aros-sg]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

P96 is a software interface for RTG hardware, how the hardware operates does not matter provided there is a driver for it.

Does P96 support drivers where access to the hardware (~framebuffer) is always and only done by the driver itself but never ever by P96 core itself (i.e. no things like direct access to framebuffer by P96 core for things like migration between RAM and VRAM)?

[clebin]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

I know that SAGA is hardware (not fully, but well) and RTG is software, please mind that I was explaining it to Clebin

Ok, well I'll answer your earlier point:

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

It does matter.

I maintain that it doesn't and I think you're living in the past by making a hard & fast distinction between hardware and software, when that is not how things operate in the retro world today.

All of the products I mentioned - Minimig AGA, ZZ9000, Vampire, Pistorm, Buffee, UAE - are infinitely modifiable and programmable. It doesn't matter that Pistorm is emulation and Vampire is FPGA. If the ZZ9000 wants to support SAGA, then provided it fits in the FPGA, it can support it 5 years from now. That's nothing like how hardware used to be.

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by clebin

I maintain that it doesn't and I think you're living in the past by making a hard & fast distinction between hardware and software, when that is not how things operate in the retro world today..

Nowadays solutions which are trying add new standards are not retro, they at best are "pseudo-retro". That's my opinion, but I suppose You have different POV. And maybe let's stop this topic here.

Originally Posted by clebin

All of the products I mentioned - Minimig AGA, ZZ9000, Vampire, Pistorm, Buffee, UAE - are infinitely modifiable and programmable.

But You still miss that SAGA is not open-source, and it probably not happens in near future. For me reason why it's still not open-source yet is clear - V-Team don't want share "this cake" with anyone.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

That's my opinion, but I suppose You have different POV. And maybe let's stop this topic here.

Agreed.

For me reason why it's still not open-source yet is clear - V-Team don't want share "this cake" with anyone.

They’ve announced quite the opposite so this pure conjecture. Personality politics, once again. It’s really hard to take technical points at face value when they’re accompanied with bitterness and vitriol towards the creators.

But I think I’ve made my points here. I don’t think I’ve ever painted a rosy picture of SAGA’s future, but I’m not going to join in the black & white Vampire=good/Vampire=evil division that this always seems to turn into.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by aros-sg

Does P96 support drivers where access to the hardware (~framebuffer) is always and only done by the driver itself but never ever by P96 core itself (i.e. no things like direct access to framebuffer by P96 core for things like migration between RAM and VRAM)?

Err... Maybe I don't understand the question, but the short answer is "no". P96 requires a linear frame buffer mapped into the CPU address space. The driver may accelerate some low-level functions, but P96 also provides access functions to allow user code to render directly into video RAM.



Nonlinear frame buffers (as for the Retina Z2) are not supported (anymore).

[grelbfarlk]

I thought there was a P96 driver for classic chipsets now? So if you targeted P96, basically as long as you had a compatible screenmode you could target everything ECS or AGA and forward that that had a P96 driver?