FPGA Amiga

[ppcamiga1]

There are no attacks on the vampire.
Just some unsatisfied customers express their opinion about this crap.
Instead of announced second coming of Jay Miner, there is cheaper 68060, with faster RAM, but slower FPU, no MMU and 3D.

[TrashyMG]

  In 2018 vampire has 68060 50 MHz integer performance, 12 times worse floating point performance than 68060 50 MHz, has no MMU, has no 3D support.  
Advantages over old 68060 cards for amiga are: faster RAM and faster 2D graphics.
  At current price, performance, compatibility vampire is not attractive to amiga ng users, and advanced classic users.
It is simple, nobody want to change hardware to worse and pay for it.

Even if those blatant performance lies were true, it won't be with the gold 2.7 release as Gunnar and team have managed a full HW FPU solution on the current vampires in the latest beta builds of their core, which is fully compatible, plus considerable faster than any 68060 even overclocked to it's limits.

Cost $320 dollars for a V2 Vampire is not that much really, vs what a thousand or two dollars for an old 68060 card that may be in good enough shape to run properly? NG systems are way out of my price range.

[kolla]

Oh, and yes, it is not a company doing this so expecting the project to be run like Motorola would have done it is a bit silly.

Exactly, so maybe it is also incorrect to speculate that the 68080 is what Motorola would have done if they had continued with 68k? It just happens that we *know* what Motorola would have done, had they continued with 68k - ColdFire.

Anyways, this "what if" was not directed at you, but at IanP, so no reason for you to feel all wounded and heart broken.

[kolla]

Gunnar and team have managed a full HW FPU solution on the current vampires in the latest beta builds of their core

So now it is full HW FPU on gold 2.7 too? No software emulation taking place? You know this for a fact? Or is it just the usual spin? Because the hearsay was exactly same thing a year ago.

Cost $320 dollars for a V2 Vampire is not that much really, vs what a thousand or two dollars for an old 68060 card that may be in good enough shape to run properly?

I have systems with Vampire cards and I have systems with 030 cards and I have systems with 060 cards, and CSPPC, and I have MiST, Minimig, MiSTer and soon FleaFPGA... which of all those do you think gets used _least_?

NG systems are way out of my price range.

For USD 320 you can get a damn nice AROS system, brand new.

[psxphill]

And what damage is there? The 080 will execute both 040 and 060 optimised code faster than any 040 or 060.

Cherry picked code. Anything interesting runs at 0% the speed of an 040 or 060

[TrashyMG]

So now it is full HW FPU on gold 2.7 too? No software emulation taking place? You know this for a fact? Or is it just the usual spin? Because the hearsay was exactly same thing a year ago.

Was confirmed the other day on IRC and the forum

I have systems with Vampire cards and I have systems with 030 cards and I have systems with 060 cards, and CSPPC, and I have MiST, Minimig, MiSTer and soon FleaFPGA... which of all those do you think gets used _least_?

Lets see the one that is made by a team you have a predisposed hatred for?

For USD 320 you can get a damn nice AROS system, brand new.

Okay sure, but it doesn't boost my classic hardware.

[moogaloonie]

The NTSC/PAL thing was a pain in the butt, however, the later A500's and all A1200's could be booted into PAL mode and on the 1084 nothing was cut off the bottom. In my "group of gamers" 5 of us had PAL capable A500's and one didn't until I upgraded it. Also there were quite a few European games that were available in NTSC format in the late 80's, although if you  try to download a copy now it will probably be the PAL version. Seems most of the cracked versions were from Europe.

Oh, from a computer perspective, there were countless PAL games that were playable and plenty of NTSC titles too... But from a console perspective I think they were on the wrong track.  Consoles are normally connected to the TV, and only an Amiga user would have a 1084 handy.  People expect those things to "just work".  C= seemed to have nothing in place to guarantee the end-user experience, to make sure that CD32 titles were region appropriate and properly ported (saves, control etc.) from the desktop to console. They had produced a legit console, sure, but they were still treating it like a computer in allowing people to sort through software of varying quality and compatibility.

[kolla]

Was confirmed the other day on IRC and the forum

Experience tells me that such confirmations are pretty worthless.

Lets see the one that is made by a team you have a predisposed hatred for?

I have zero hate here, what you are seeing is disappointment and eye-rolling over a project that initially was cool, but then turned out to be something else.

And no, i don't use the Vampire systems much. Most of the software I want to use on them does not run on them, and the software that does run, runs just as well and even better elsewhere. My most used system is hands down the MiST, which is a fraction as fast as the Vampire, but can pretty much run the same software, and with AGA it can even run a lot of software that the Vampire systems cannot run currently. Maybe with Gold core 2.7 and 3 they will see more usage, but I kinda doubt it.

Okay sure, but it doesn't boost my classic hardware.

So? You said "NG is too expensive", neither MorphOS nor OS4 boost your classic hardware either.

I suggest you buy Vampire card, now, at once, while you can. Wait for V4? There are no guarantees that there will be a V4.

[TrashyMG]

Experience tells me that such confirmations are pretty worthless.

Well that and there are a ton of videos out there from Devs testing that core.

I have zero hate here, what you are seeing is disappointment and eye-rolling over a project that initially was cool, but then turned out to be something else.

Serious?, you're relentless on multiple forums.

And no, i don't use the Vampire systems much. Most of the software I want to use on them does not run on them, and the software that does run, runs just as well and even better elsewhere. My most used system is hands down the MiST, which is a fraction as fast as the Vampire, but can pretty much run the same software, and with AGA it can even run a lot of software that the Vampire systems cannot run currently. Maybe with Gold core 2.7 and 3 they will see more usage, but I kinda doubt it.

MiST is only realy good if you only just want to do WHDLoad or classic things. My MiST has literally been a Paper Weight even before getting my Vampire(s).

So? You said "NG is too expensive", neither MorphOS nor OS4 boost your classic hardware either.

Never said they did, still they're expensive.

I suggest you buy Vampire card, now, at once, while you can. Wait for V4? There are no guarantees that there will be a V4.

Already have two of them, looking forward the V4, but don't really have an interest in the stand-alone version as I'm a fan of using the classic hardware.

[Niding]

Well, as has been said many times already;

The Core is *Work in progress*, and what doesnt work now, might work down the road.

Britelites approach to his critizism/comments about the Core is much more useful than most;
It highlights in a calm and objective way what he personally find lacking/problematic, without feeling the need to attibute a malignant effect to it.

Lacking documentation? Sure, but considering its work in progress, AND there are limited number of developers available to check all the boxes in the process.
Develop the core or write long documentations/guides? Finding time to it all at the same time is just not possible.

Ive been a workerdrone in a company for years, and I was somewhat annoyed when managers didnt bother to produce decent documentation for the processes we had internally. Now Im one of the managers myself, and have to execute my work in addition to keep up with the paperwork/documentation, and I understand how hard it is to actually find time do it all. And Ive noticed that I focus on executing work instead of getting all the documentation fully complete.

[guest11527]

I wonder what people would say if a company had launched the 68080 SoC as an ASIC without any prior public discussion (with all the same features as planned for the core of the Vampire 4 standalone except the Amiga AGA backwards compatibility, ~80MHz, AMMX, FPU, 24 bit graphics, 16 bit audio, new registers etc for around $100). Would everybody be clamouring for somebody to start building Amiga compatibles using the chip or would there be people complaining that it's not identical to an existing 680x0 processor?

Is this again becoming one of these "what-if" stories that makes your head hurt? A serious chip supply company runs a market analysis before launching a product. Motorola did, and the result was PPC and Coldfire. A serious computer hardware vendor makes a market analysis and picks the chip that fits best to their requirements, after having made a market analysis what the customer wants. CBM did not, and went bankrupt.

Any further questions like this?

[moogaloonie]

Is this again becoming one of these "what-if" stories that makes your head hurt? A serious chip supply company runs a market analysis before launching a product. Motorola did, and the result was PPC and Coldfire. A serious computer hardware vendor makes a market analysis and picks the chip that fits best to their requirements, after having made a market analysis what the customer wants. CBM did not, and went bankrupt.

Any further questions like this?

Not how I remember that at all.  Maybe my tinfoil hat was too tight back then, but I recall PPC being joint design of Apple and Motorola with Apple effectively locking everyone else out of using it on the desktop. With the ColdFire cutting a lot out of the 68k line, and making it a less than ideal replacement, Apple essentially dealt death blows to the Amiga, The ST and Sharp's X68000 simultaneously. Not that Atari or Sharp would necessarily have produced a machine based on a future 680x0 but it was the nail in the coffin for both platforms nonetheless. I'm sure Apple realized that their platform had been driving that architecture forward significantly, so why should the Amiga always benefit equally from its evolution?

[kolla]

PPC being joint design of Apple and Motorola with Apple effectively locking everyone else out of using it on the desktop.

It was AIM - Apple, IBM and Motorola. Apple at the time was willing to license out their OS for other PPC systems than their own. There was PREP, there was CHRP. There were several operating systems targeting the PowerPC, not just IBM's AIX and Apple's MacOS. IBM also had OS/2. Even Microsoft was developing WindowsNT for PowerPC, and there was plans for a PowerPC 615 with integrated x86 execution to help Microsoft on the way. What pulled the feet under PowerPC on the desktop was Apple pulling their license program, while IBM had already given up on OS/2. Microsoft was more than happy to just stay on x86.

With the ColdFire cutting a lot out of the 68k line, and making it a less than ideal replacement, Apple essentially dealt death blows to the Amiga, The ST and Sharp's X68000 simultaneously.

That is such nonsense - what killed the Amiga, besides Commodore screwing up - was the INTERNET. Networking the Amiga was cumbersome at best, all the software was geared towards BBS and dial-up use. Ethernet solutions were rare and expensive, the TCP stacks (AS-225/Inet-225 and AmiTCP) were not exactly top notch, bug ridden and limited. Not to mention incompatible with each other, and incompatible with Envoy - the networking stack for SOHO Amiga LAN networks. There was zero protection. This was before smart firewalls, even NAT was not common. MuFS was created in sort of desperation. AMIX was there, GNU was there, BSD and Linux came along. A whole lot of Amiga developers moved to BSD and Linux and did well developing on those platforms, most even did it on 68k hardware to begin with - and still do! Porting all this new *ix software to Amiga was sometimes trivial, but most often hard. Fred Fish tried hard. IXemul was born, GeekGadgets, ADE. There was AmiNIX, a BSD kernel running on top of AmigaOS.

But it all boiled down to one single thing - AmigaOS was doomed due to its design, due to one single shared memory space, due to lack of _any_ kind of security. It was obvious that if you put your computer online, you _need_ protection, and Amiga just didn't have that, and hence developers did not see any future in it. Security through obscurity is no good business model.

[kolla]

Well that and there are a ton of videos out there from Devs testing that core.

Testing seems to be limited to running demos?

Serious?, you're relentless on multiple forums.

So are many others, don't confuse enthusiasm with hate.

MiST is only realy good if you only just want to do WHDLoad or classic things. My MiST has literally been a Paper Weight even before getting my Vampire(s).

Right "or classic things" - I am in it for the "classic things". When I use Vampire systems, it's like using a broken UAE setup, there is speed, but software often crash in obscure ways and behave weirdly. And the speed is not really _that_ great either. On the MiST, with a few exceptions, things work consistently, and as expected.

Never said they did, still they're expensive.

But AROS isn't, and AROS is also "NG".

Already have two of them, looking forward the V4, but don't really have an interest in the stand-alone version as I'm a fan of using the classic hardware.

When you have a V4 inside the Amiga, with Gold Core 3, your "classic hardware" is reduced to a glorified keyboard, mouse and joystick extension of the V4.

[grond]

When I use Vampire systems, it's like using a broken UAE setup, there is speed, but software often crash in obscure ways and behave weirdly. And the speed is not really _that_ great either. On the MiST, with a few exceptions, things work consistently, and as expected.

Sounds like you have contact or power supply problems.

[kolla]

I doubt it, since it is not related to one system or one power supply.