I just wrote 200 lines of text and firefox crashed and I need to start again. OMG what a nightmare, hate PC.
Yes, problem is with customs nothing else.
All the time I was saying that I hope that someone smarter will continue and now I see that there are few Amiga FPGA related projects on the way from the ppl who just joined Amiga scene. When someone asked me why do I think that new ppl will join Amiga scene I answered just because that is the scene where they can prove themselves easier than proving their skills in X86 scene. In that scene no one will notice that you have build faster memory controller or better USB memory device. Yes you can sell that and earn lot of money but in that scene no one cares who build that. In amiga scene coders, hardware designers, programmers will join for that reason because building small things here can give you a chance to be remembered in computers history, not in papers, patents, books you will be remembered by the end users. The same thing happened with other small scenes who are huge now(Ubuntu, Android). Yes I m a dreamer but just wait.
Somehow I feel that after few new projects Amiga scene is changing, now everyone is helping me sending lot of parts I need. After they realized that all of this could work after the long period of time they are excited.
About BigGun, he is the man who will change Amiga world. When he contacted me to buy Vampire from me I just know that everything is going as I imagined. I wanted to send the boards to him for free but he refused and I feel some kind of shame charging him for the boards because I know that he will make another step. After that he invited me to join apollo-team and I realized that I just can't keep up with rest of the team. Learning process was too slow and only solution for me is to fly to Germany to fill gaps in my knowledge. That is something I need to do, but "real" life is on the way. Let me say this that BigGun is so persistent to finish this project that he refused my proposal to enter Bitcoin scene and earn enough money for ten lives.
Let's answer few questions now:
Phoenix core will be sent to all Vampire 600 users. Problem was in the FPGA I used because it is too small, only 8K LE and that was the only reason why apollo-team had to slowdown to shrink each part of the code. Performance, I have the values but let's keep that as a surprise, let's say that A600 will be your primary Amiga
Core based on TG68(without cache) with lot more memory is easy to build, maybe half an hour but I stopped development of that core waiting for Phoenix. Also because thunderstorms in my city I have lost most of my equipment and need lot of time to recover to start work on the project again. Let's say that my USB blaster cable died and that I repaired it using parts from broken A600 motherboard, amazing
Reset bug is the real problem, and as much I tried to solved it with the code I didn't resolve the problem. It can't be solved on that version of Vampire just because I made a mistake in designing it. At the time I didn't know the fact that Amiga can perform reset by using keyboard keys(soft reset), imagine
If I had that info i could fix that problem easily. So now I was thinking to redesign the board but then that will not be fair for the ppl who have first version.
About marketing and board promotion, let me start again conspiracy theory in Amiga world, there are certain ppl who earn a lot of money from Amiga name, they don't like new players joining and they will do everything to block you and to prove everyone that only their approach is the right one. There is nothing special in building Amiga accelerator with "real cpu". I can build it in a week. Manipulating the market as an only Amiga developer is easy, but that is about to change
