Jens Shoenfeld's anwer to the Apollo petition

[runequester]

In the end, everyone was free to ask him, and he was free to answer as he felt fit. All good.

[Damion]

I did a search on Amiga.org for 'Apollo' and I see 13 pages of threads, perhaps 70-80% of them involve troubleshooting for seemingly random issues. Many of the remainder are from Apollo owners wanting a different brand of accelerator. One wonders why. You don't patch up a shoddy design over and over, its like bailing water out of a sinking rowboat with a 0.5m (~18") hole torn in the side. Just abandon that ship already.

Lots of examples of this in the Amigaverse, like the Cyberstorm PPC or Delfina. Honestly it's a challenge to get any expanded Amiga working reliably, which for some of us is part of the fun. That said, no one wants to deal with obviously broken hardware. My Apollo 1260 was one of the better accelerators I had, not nearly as user-friendly as my Blizzard 1260 was, but (with a little effort) just as stable, and quite a bit faster. It was perfect for demos, and would often run for days without a reboot. Still, the Apollo cards weren't the pinnacle, and not everyone was as lucky as I was or had the patience to sort through the bugs.

[sim085]

Jens produced a new Accelerator Card for the A1200 ... why not get that one? For me I just want Jens to make the ACA520!! Can someone pester him with an email about that .... pleaseee ....

[EvilGuy]

Can you imagine all the ppl copying the design and selling new boards for probably a small monetary gain.

What? In the Amiga community? How many of us are there left that could build a new accelerator board and mass-produce it even if we had the instructions? Hell, going by some of the posts on Amiga.org, there'd only be a handful of Amiga users left that could even open the box of an accelerator board without bitching and moaning about it the whole time.

Meh to this whole Apollo mess; 74 users might be unhappy with Jens but that's nothing, I probably pissed off more than 74 people in the last 24 hours.

(And if Jens needs 40k to feel good about his investment in broken hardware, thank $DIETY that he is good at building hardware and not investments :>)

[Karlos]

All 3 of the Apollo 1240 cards presently in my possession work, but two of them are definitely a bit suspect. The third, a later revision board clocked at 28MHz achieved an uptime of over a week (was rendering an animation that would take a few minutes on modern kit ). It could have gone on for longer, but I turned off the machine once the job was done for a rest well-earned.

[spirantho]

My Apollo 2030 is great - but if I change anything at all then it becomes very unreliable. It took me ages to realise that the SCSI on it was actually working, because it was so strange, and if I add a second RAM stick to it it just crashes all over the place.
However, with one RAM chip and an occasional SCSI zip drive, it's now working really well.

[Brian]

I totaly understand Jens in this.

He have explained that he bought it to remove an issue of Apolloowners complaining on his hardware for being faulty when it's issues caused by their CPU board. I know people can have a hard time accepting that it's not a newly installed peice of hardware that is to blame for a surfaced issues but a previous installed component. It have likely cost him a lot of time and money and it's perfectly possible it's been enough by it's own to get Jens to take the steps and buying it. That said I'm in no doubt that he have gained some new knowledge and understanding from the purchase and possibly used this in one way or another in his later products. Only Jens can say how big a contributing factor this had on the purchase but I won't speculate in it nor any other possible motives there might have been.

You can't expect him to go against his best interest and passing this on, let alone for free, and try to pressure him to do so with an online petition is borderline of being an insult. Be glad it didn't backfire, at least now you get an option to buy MACH131 chips.

[AmiDude]

I totaly understand Jens in this.

He have explained that he bought it to remove an issue of Apolloowners complaining on his hardware for being faulty when it's issues caused by their CPU board. I know people can have a hard time accepting that it's not a newly installed peice of hardware that is to blame for a surfaced issues but a previous installed component.

My Apollo 1260/80Mhz is running great and stable, happily together with Jens' IdivisionAGA!  :biglaugh:

It's the ACA 1230/42 accelerator from Jens that causes problems with some A1200 motherboard revisions.

[CritAnime]

I respect Jens decision on this. Having bought several of his products, as I am sure a fair number of a.org users have, I have seen the high standard of hardware he produces. If he says there are issues then I would take his word for it. Maybe there is something hidden in the package of stuff he bought that looks iffy.

[matt3k]

It's his property and he his handling it in the best way he sees fit.  Makes sense...

Wonder when Amiga Imminent Domain will take over ...

[magnetic]

Well I warned you guys the petition would be useless. Its kind of funny to use a reason of instability of boards when some of the ACA line is unstable! That being said he owns the IP and paid a lot of money for it and can do what he wants. Its cool that he will provide the mach 131 chips as that is one of the main goals for petitioning is it not?

Oh and for the record I had an Apollo 030@40mhz that was very reliable and stable.

[LaserBack]

Jens says that apollo board are crap and unstable lol that's a big lie
The turboboards that are unstable and crap are those crap ACA boards
he purchased the rights of the apollo to monopolize the market
if anyone here believe that Jens is a good person and he wants to salve the amiga is because lol I will stop here

[vidarh]

Jens is full of it and anyone who believes he's done this out of some sense of altruism is a chump. I would have had more respect for Jens if he just said "no" and skipped the bs. It's his to do with whatever he pleases, no need to make stuff up.

Where does he claim it is out of altruism? On the contrary:

1) He claims it costs him money and time in support to deal with people who buy his other products and blame them for problems caused by the Apollo cards.

2) He claims it takes Amiga's off the market. And while preventing that might benefit users if it's a real issue, it certainly benefits him to keep as many classics as possible around too: The fewer classics are around, the smaller his market becomes.

You might not believe those are real reasons, but he's hardly pretending it's out of altruism.

[darkage]

The turboboards that are unstable and crap are those crap ACA boards

Perhaps his own design is loosely based upon the Apollo Design.  After all the Apollo IP saves a ton of R&D time, looking at other ppls work can really help boost your own ideas..  Just re-implement with your own vision of how the design should have been, cram as much as possible into a FPGA to lower footprint and make it more elegant.

[LoadWB]

Jens says that apollo board are crap and unstable lol that's a big lie

Does it matter?  The designs belong to him.  They're not free to the Amiga Community (I believe someone here mentioned "Amiga Eminent Domain") simply because they are Amiga.  No one else ponied up the money for the designs so no one else gets to say what happens to them.  If we should point fingers at someone for this great disservice why not point fingers at whomever sold him the designs and rights in the first place.

We have enough whiz-kids around here who could design or pay to commission new accelerators rather than brow-beat someone who has spent time to design, develop, and produce quality Amiga hardware.  I just can't understand why the whinging has to continue because, boo hoo, Jens won't part with a product he purchased because he's a mean bastard!  Jens has and we don't, let's vilify him!

Seriously, some people need to grow up.  He's more than legitimized some of the arguments by agreeing to compromise with the sale of the MACH chips and ROMs.  IMNSHO the signers of the petitions are damn lucky he didn't simply say f-off tossers.

[magnetic]

Seriously, some people need to grow up.  He's more than legitimized some of the arguments by agreeing to compromise with the sale of the MACH chips and ROMs.  IMNSHO the signers of the petitions are damn lucky he didn't simply say f-off tossers.

 
While I agree with you that its good that the Mach chips will be available due to the petition, I hardly thing that one of the remaining Amiga hardware manufacturers should tell potential customers to "f-off tossers" that is NOT good business. That kind of atittude i s NOT how you treat the community. (someone should tell some other amiga companies we know this as well)  Unfortanely with the level of fanboyism some amiga -ish companies feel like they can get away with bad customer support and products. We should just be grateful they are there. (even though we pay with hard earned money)