Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4

[IanP]

Okay, I GREATLY appreciate the work going into the Vampires.  I have a 500+v2 or v2+ of my own and it's been pretty damn awesome.  HOWEVER, why are we still sticking with IDE and not going SATA?  Or both?  Am I in the minority for my desire to use SSDs instead of CFs or even IDE DoM?

In any case, a Vampire for the 1200 will be sweet!

Possibly because of operating system limitations, unless you use a SATA to PATA chip in which case the end user may as well buy a third party converter interface.

[IanP]

Apollo Core already includes a special MMU, as far as I know there are no plans for a Motorola compatible MMU. As for hardware FPU I don't know, it may or may not eventually have one so if that's a deal breaker either wait and see or stick with Motorola hardware.

[IanP]

I wonder if the standalone will also run other FPGA cores like MIST does... Atari ST might be fun to do as well as Amiga

I doubt the V4 will ever have a core selection with loads of retro computer/console/arcade cores to choose from.

Whether it will ever come with other system cores or only "emulation" like EmuTOS I don't know. If BigGun ever runs out of Amiga things to do he may find the time and will to do the Atari ST hardware implementation.

[IanP]

Are there any old software FPUs that the Vampire could run? Something to simply emulate one or tell the OS and other software there is one even if the ops are slower than potential hardware?

I assume you aren't being sarcastic and genuinely missed the beta release of Femu recently. It's a brand new software FPU emulation including a version optimised for the Vampire (Apollo 68080 core).

[IanP]

No need to recompile old apps for no FPU, just use Femu for now or wait for FPU on the V4.

[IanP]

Amiga reloaded was announced over 2 years ago at Amiga 30 Amsterdam and still all we have seen is a wiki page of potential specifications. Vampire V4 was announced, what 3 days ago with images of the standalone/500 version and target availability of Q4 this year. With reloaded you'll need to add a amiga doner case, keyboard and mouse, accelerator and if you want features of the V4 like USB and Ethernet you'll need to buy those as well, you may need a DVI to HDMI adaptor. Of course you'll miss out on the power of the Apollo Core and enhanced audio. But if you just want a new A1200 like machine then the reloaded will be fine I expect.