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Author Topic: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4  (Read 68516 times)

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Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #29 from previous page: September 07, 2018, 09:29:50 PM »
http://forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1937

September 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.
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #30 on: September 29, 2018, 05:51:14 PM »
Skipp, which is a beta tester, has finally gotten his hands on a V4, and have run thru a few demos.

Ghostown & Loonies "Human Traffic" Amiga AGA Demo (Vampire V4)

First ever capture from my shiny new Vampire V4 :) "Human Traffic" AGA/FPU demo by GTN&LNS (2011). Running on alpha AGA+FPU core revision 5484 (~92MHz, not 78MHz despite what "WhichAmiga" thinks). Recorded in realtime 720x576 50fps with StarTech PEXHDCAP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eseAQFySGzY

The Black Lotus "Ocean Machine" Amiga AGA Demo (Vampire V4)

One of TBL's finest productions so far, "Ocean Machine" AGA/FPU demo running on A500 with Vampire V4 and 68080 alpha 5484 core. Realtime recording with StarTech PEXHDCAP (PAL 720x576@50).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWtIAagvEeo

Focus Design "Aulun Baulund" Amiga AGA Demo (Vampire V4)

Apollo Core rev. 5484 (AGA/FPU) running "Aulun Baulund" by Focus Design on Amiga 500 and Vampire V4 (92MHz). Realtime 720x576@50fps recording (StarTech PEXHDCAP/HDMI).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQLDUaLgVUQ
« Last Edit: September 29, 2018, 06:58:17 PM by Niding »
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #31 on: September 29, 2018, 06:09:45 PM »
Vampire V2 Is Now AmigaOS 3.1.4 Ready

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=17502

Quote
Thanks to the awesome work of Bax, all Vampire V2 are now ready for AmigaOS 3.1.4
 
All instructions available on our Wiki
EXTERNAL LINK
 
Ready for landing !

http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/amigaos314

Some of the newer demos has been an issue for the Apollo Core, and it seems to be improving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2Hy_3vBqU

Focus Design "Teobstrrofarfeia" Amiga AGA Demo (Vampire V4)

A500 with Vampire V4 and Apollo Core GOLD3 alpha (rev. 5484) running "Teobstrrofarfeia" by Focus Design (2012). Recorded in realtime 50fps with StarTech PEXHDCAP (HDMI 720x576).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ceqEptW3nc
« Last Edit: September 30, 2018, 05:57:43 PM by Niding »
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #32 on: October 03, 2018, 12:00:00 PM »
The Guru Meditation uploaded a overview of the V4, presented by Manuel Jesus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zaDLI19RTU
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #33 on: October 18, 2018, 01:10:07 PM »
GOLD2.11 is now out !

[GOLD2.11] (18.10.2018)
* Added Out of Order Execution for FPU
* Improved FPU to 52bit precision (fixes Elude demos)
* Forward bug fixed (thanks to neoman)

http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=6&note=17984&z=9PiZVA
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #34 on: October 19, 2018, 10:44:27 AM »
Well, V4 has been provided to betatesters, and they have started to release recordings of their testing.

With regards to the question; I havent seen any pre-order options for V4 (I havent looked very hard tho).

BigD have a point that putting money up front before a product is released can be risky, so its a fair comment.
That said; the Vampire/Apollo team has delivered on the V2 front, so I wouldnt feel it to be a risky venture to pre-order V4 if that option was available.

I understand the intrest in such an option tho, since the V2 queue was/is quite long, and unless you ordered as soon as it was available, you where in for several months of wait.
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4
« Reply #35 on: October 19, 2018, 11:23:55 AM »
Yes, life is short.

Which is why Im not fuzzed about the speed of these projects, since I cant take anything with me to the grave (I can, but I wont care). I ordered the V2, and "forgot" about it. Then suddenly it appeared in the mail. The wait didnt hurt, since life goes on in parallel.