Vampire V2+ or wait for V4

[kolla]

Originally Posted by demolition

They are registered as companies?

Why are they registered as companies? Would it not be easier to do what "the team" is doing and avoid all kinds of paperwork and responsibilities? It's not like Elbox, IComp etc are making a living from selling Amiga gear.

[spudje]

I'm pretty sure as soon as you sort of sell stuff (you build) on a regular basis and want to make some profit you're pretty much obliged. I guess Apollo needs to do / has done that too, especially for the V4, which will be produced more professionally.

[Glen M]

I think I need to clarify my "modern" statement and rather I'll give a wish list of my Amiga experience with options as I see it:

1. High resolution colourful workbench environment on a modern display.

Scan doubler such as indivision. Would tick the modern display box but not so much the high resolution and colourful workbench.

Classic hardware such as a blizzard graphics card or mediator and PCI graphics card which will work but cost me a fortune (I wish I'd never sold my mediator, all be it I could never get it to work).

Vampire. Ticks the box at an affordable price point.

2. Ability to go online for general browsing and streaming music or video

PCMCIA network card on my A1200 030 40mhz. Obviously the cheapest option but not really practical. Forget streaming anything and web sites will be horribly slow and squashed on the standard resolution.

Go the mediator route. Not sure on this one but I think my 030 will be the limiting factor. Any hardware acceleration from a PCI sound or video card? I'd possibly need to look at an 040 or 060 accelerator at £££

Vampire. General browsing and streaming audio will work. Streaming video appears to work in low resolution but I think with time this will improve. So for the minute the vampire tick 2 of the items here.

PPC and OS4. This would be the best option for the features I want but is extremely costly and for me looses that classic amiga feel. In my head I may as well just use emulation.

3. Play with 060 and RTG software because why not.

Classic hardware. High price and ageing hardware.

Vampire. Affordable price but maybe not 100% compatible?

Putting all that to the side I suppose in many ways I see the vampire as an opportunity to see into the high end classic amiga world without remortgaging my house. Rather than using the word modern to compare it to an I7 gaming rig I suppose I was trying to use the terms to frame my wanted list as above. If you consider the price tag for the performance and features it really is a no brainer.

Going right back to the original question and title of this thread is V2+ or wait for V4?. Its not do I need or want a vampire its do I buy now or do I wait. V4 in my 1200 would be the first choice. My 1200 was my first Amiga from childhood so I was late to the game compared to some of you gents and hence my wish to stick with that machine. I understand its likely to be a while for v4 so V2+ seems the best option at the minute. Taking this further if V4 for the A500 is going to be available in say 6 months but the 1200 version say 2 years later I'll wait for V4 A500.

I'd also take this opportunity to again acknowledge that I have previously criticised Vampire but when you take a step back and actually look at what it offers for its price point it suddenly makes a lot of sense. I'd also again stress that I understand this is created by a high skilled team of enthusiasts and personally just taking a minute to think about that is mind blowing, I'd love to have the knowledge and skills to get involved with such projects but alas I'm just a bystander in such things.

I'll close with the fact that I tend to ramble on a bit so sorry for the long winded post!

EDIT: I'd also add that my expanding the Amiga is not an attempt to replace my laptop, my gaming PC, my mobile phone all of which will always be more powerful. Its about wanting to experience the best of what classic Amiga can offer at an affordable price.

[Chucky]

none of the things you wrote is new since. 98.-

browse on an Amiga is.. just plain stupid. browsers are sooo behind that is is just a joke even trying to say anything about it. and they will never ever be modern. even with a cpu that is like a 700MHz 060.

bascially my point is "modern amiga" will never ever be like any modern platform. not even like the rapsberry pi.

so if you like the vampire path. why wait for v4? get a v2 and sell it when v4 arrives and vampire still is your thing..

but "modern amiga computing" will still be the same as we had in the end of the 90s..
maybe slightly faster. but software is still painfully outdated.

[Glen M]

Originally Posted by Chucky

none of the things you wrote is new since. 98.-

browse on an Amiga is.. just plain stupid. browsers are sooo behind that is is just a joke even trying to say anything about it. and they will never ever be modern. even with a cpu that is like a 700MHz 060.

bascially my point is "modern amiga" will never ever be like any modern platform. not even like the rapsberry pi.

so if you like the vampire path. why wait for v4? get a v2 and sell it when v4 arrives and vampire still is your thing..

but "modern amiga computing" will still be the same as we had in the end of the 90s..
maybe slightly faster. but software is still painfully outdated.

as I say it won't replace my laptop, PC or phone (which to be honest is likely most peoples main internet portal these days). You're 100% correct it will not replace those things and it won't be modern (in the true meaning of the word) but it will be a end of 90s amiga and how amazingly cool is that for 300 euros? Plus pushing my end of 90's hardware to try and do "modern" things is all the fun and by that I mean that vampire opens the ability to do such things whereas the stock hardware is essentially to far gone to even try.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Glen M

but it will be a end of 90s amiga and how amazingly cool is that for 300 euros?

I don't know, I don't find it particularly amazing. It's been 20 years since 1998, the Minimig is already more than 10 years ago, Natami about the same iirc. CBM Amiga only existed for 10 years. MPEG on Amiga was already a thing when Commodore existed, so I really don't get the hoopla there... to be honest I was quite surprised that there was a new release of RiVa for updated AMMX2, and still no mpeg2. To enjoy video with Vampire, you typically rely on some other computer to do re-coding for you (for example, my QNAP NAS can do it), but the novelty of watching mpeg1 videos on the Amiga screen quickly wears off, I rather use the Amiga to remote control other devices that can do video playback so much better.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Chucky

Just a question. WHAT is a "modern Amiga experience"?

My use of quotes is well intentional, because this seems to mean a different thing to anyone you ask. Glen explained what he meant, so that's clarified in the context of his thread.

Originally Posted by Chucky

none of the things you wrote is new since. 98.-
[...]
but "modern amiga computing" will still be the same as we had in the end of the 90s..
maybe slightly faster. but software is still painfully outdated.

Yes, I agree with you 100%, and this is why I am not a fan of any of that nor a user or anything.

However, being objective, within the palette of apps and possibilities the whole Amiga world has, probably the "best' option to approximate more to what a "modern" computing experience is, is going with the PowerPC platforms, be it AmigaOS 4.x, MorphOS or something.

To me Vampire offers not much (at the moment) to approximate to that "modern" experience if that's what you want to do, but from what I read about what they want to do with the platform, I feel like they would like to bridge toward that area. But at the moment, it does not, and it's not entirely up to them. Not a fault of the hardware per se, but you can't create software out of thin air, and not even Amiga PPC has a decent enough web browser, so even less 68k. That's the main thing here: unless it's something made since Vampire exists and FOR Vampire (like Cannonball port), you';re still using shit old programs from the 90s. Nothing modern about that. It has nothing to do with the speed or how good the hardware is.

[Glen M]

I was going to write another rambling response but whats the point.

This thread is going off on a tangent, away from the original question which really revolved around when is V4 likely to be released. Since there is no consensus on this other than "2 weeks" or "when its done" I'll take my time to wait for my V2+ offer e-mail and make a decision.

2 weeks reminds me of the film Money Pit. When its done reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. Not sure if that is relevant.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Glen M

I was going to write another rambling response but whats the point.

This thread is going off on a tangent, away from the original question which really revolved around when is V4 likely to be released. Since there is no consensus on this other than "2 weeks" or "when its done" I'll take my time to wait for my V2+ offer e-mail and make a decision.

2 weeks reminds me of the film Money Pit. When its done reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. Not sure if that is relevant.

Hello Glen,

Some people are notorious Vampire critics (I'm sure you can guess who) so any opportunity to question its validity is like waving fresh grass in front of the cow.. or something.. ;-) Whatever floats their boat I guess, but yea, derailing threads is not polite.
To adress your original questions I'll just say this.
Waiting for something that doesn't have a release date is a source of frustration. You dont want frustration in your life. If you have the cash, get a V2+ for the 500... and be ready to be a "beta tester", because thats what you buy into.. Its a journey, some enjoy it more than others though..

I got my v2 early but havent found the time to tinker with it a lot tbh. The V4 will probably be released when the team feels its feature complete according to their own internal goals, (but you could probably make a good guess...or check the apollo forums). Afther that, tweaks, optimizations and general tinkering could go on for many years of course. The nice thing about this is that time itself actually works in our favor here, so even if zero development is done by the team, in a bunch of years, simply migrating the same VHDL code to a new much faster (but by then, affordable) FPGA would give a nice speed increease, simply because it runs faster.. That part could theoretiaclly go on forever... almost anyway ;-)
Regarding dedicated software to run, I mean, this whole retro thing isnt really logical is it... pretty mcuh anything can be done faster on a different system, yet here we are wasting our time on this hobby of ours.. I personally think the NeoGeo emulator is neat and runs surprisingly well on current V2 core..

Good luck with your decision Glen

[solidcore]

@Apollo / Majsta the real question is what about the A1200 connectors, so where are they sourced now for cheap?

and I quote
" All of this only tells me that someone tried to play monopoly game on the market, to create distance from other projects but like history teach us in some areas this is not smart to do. "

"I ll probably find a way how to solve this problem like I solved many others in past years but situation where you need to pay for a connector same price as you are paying FPGA is not an option for now simply because makes no sense. IMHO those connectors shouldn't cost more than 5USD."

Please do share with the community, as we've yet to hear anything regarding an update on this? Else your words about being a monopoly come true for Apollo which would be a shame really wouldn't it?

[spudje]

If we would be honest I'm pretty sure that a "modern Amiga experience" really wouldn't be all that different from any of the computing experiences we have today on our Mac/Win/Linux/iOS/Android systems. They all do multimedia, 3D, gaming, internet, multi-user in a more or less user friendly GUI way...

So, I don't think there is a place for a "modern Amiga experience". I do think, for Amigans (sentimental backwards looking nerds ) like us, there is very much a place for all the Amiga variants we have and getting/keeping these experiences more or less up to date and evolve a bit is the biggest part of the fun I guess. So this justifies any of the initiatives, whether or not this diverges or converges the Amiga technology.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Hello Glen,

Some people are notorious Vampire critics

Or do you mean Apollo Core critics?

Why is it so damn hard for people to differentiate between the two very much separated and independent projects?

[majsta]

@solidcore that problem with connectors is solved 6 months ago. I did build molds and all is manufactured and in my room. In reality money earned from V500 and V600 is invested to next project. Doing molds was painful, slow and very expensive. Creating monopoly on A1200 market was/is there purely because of this. I wouldn't reveal more now but I already supported several A1200 projects done by other teams or independent developers by sending connectors for free. So as my plan stated year ago, monopoly game on Amiga scene will be stopped in every possible area. As for now I m done with sending those connectors before releasing V1200. After that I will do my best to support everyone interested to start his own A1200 related project.

[solidcore]

@Majsta Thank you for clearing things up and I hope you understood my reason for asking and thank you for not taking it too personally. I respect that you have given other a1200 projects free connectors (Although first time I heard about this?). I know FREE is asking a lot since we don't know one another but may I ask is it possible for others to purchase the connectors at the affordable price you expected to find them at back in your blog post? Seeing as you probably have not put the molds away just yet and hopefully have enough gold materials to plate the contacts of further units? I'm not saying you have to do it for those who ask (for health/time reasons I can comprehend the decision not to) but it'd be nice if you could make such an offer . Of course if we found out one day this was sourced from a undisclosed factory we'd be pretty disheartened with Apollo and that would be difficult to crawl back from in terms of the monopoly argument we both agree is unfair.

[majsta]

If I get the point you are asking me to do something for you then saying something "If we find out" hahah come on be serious... I suggest you then to do your own molds, you can do it in the range anywhere between 5000-10 000USD depending what you want. This is always like this people will question it and investigate then argue about something you want to give them as support. At least they will say he is giving me something because he got it for free so it is ok.

[Allen1]

Hi Majsta,

congratulations on successfully making molds for the Amiga 1200 expansion connectors, now that's what I call dedication I look forward to seeing what goodies will come along for our Amiga's in the near future, I am also very impressed with what you and your team have already designed and produced and will some day be purchasing some of your fine goods, its amazing what people like yourself have done/do and keep improving on.