http://forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1937September Activity Report
As summer is ending soon, people are coming back from the sea to what really matters: Amiga love. After a general slowdown in team this summer, we are also back again at work and here are the news!
Events
Apollo Team will be attending some events in next months and we are very excited to meet people there and discuss about Vampire:
Classic Computing 2018 on 22+23th of September in Oedheim-Degmarn (Germany)
µAlchimie V on 20+21th of October in Clérieux (France)
We will bring nice surprises at those events but I won’t tell more about it, you just have to be there ;-)
GOLD2.11
GOLD2.x development branch is still ongoing and we should soon release a new iteration of that core series with name of GOLD2.11 (our marketing team took weeks to choose that incredible and over original name). GOLD2.11 will introduce some very interesting feature like blitter improvement, which should fix lot of badly written games running on WHDLoad that where messing with IRQ a bit too much.
FPU has also been improved by a large margin: we were able to use bit of remaining FPGA space to extend precision of FPU up to 50Bit. This improvement fixes Elude RTG demos that were affected by the « date bug » reported on A1k. MacOS emulation was also affected by this (you could see it when running Warcraft 2, intro movie was a slideshow). Kiero helped us to address this issue and we thank him for that, thanks man!
We also introduced Out-of-Order execution on FPU instructions, which speeds up operation by another great margin when software takes advantage of it. For example, POVray likes it very much and calculation is now faster on 3D rendering scenes.
Team is also working on ICache Prefetch. This feature will also speed up lot of programs that can take advantage of it. This one is not trivial and need to be implemented conscientiously to not introduce unwanted behaviour. If it gets good enough, it will make its way in GOLD2.11.
All in one, we are super excited about bringing GOLD2.11 to all, it will make Vampire V2 even faster while improving compatibility with old games.
GOLD3
GOLD3 branch development has also continued during this summer. We went through quite a lot of games and fixed lot of them but it still requires some love. We are thinking about releasing GOLD3 as alpha and open a webpage to report bugs to help speeding up development.
Bug reports for GOLD3 would require some rules to be followed to be considered. Reporting « it doesn’t work » won’t be useful and time wasting for team.
In next days that webpage will be set up and more communication will flow accordingly. Stay tuned, AGA for everyone is around the corner.
Vampire V4
Vampire V4 is being actively tested and we are still in process of porting current core code from Cyclone III to Cyclone V. As Cyclone V FPGA cells responds very differently from the good old C3, we need to make sure that core behaves as expected on it on every case we throw at him. This process is long and very exhausting and is even involving people from Altera to make it happen.
Checkmate A1500 Plus
Our friend Stephen Jones just launched a kickstarter campaign for his checkmate A1500 Plus case, which is a perfect fit for a Vampirized Amiga. We fully support him and hope he will achieve full success on his campaign. If you haven’t yet baked it, it’s time to. Go get one here now.
