FPGA Amiga

[Britelite]

Demosceners was the future, now they are the cryin past! If they dont want to move along its up to them.

The demoscene did move along, to the PC

[Britelite]

Britelite has repeatedly given his reservations with the direction of the Apollo Core, but he isnt rejecting it in a pissed manner. His main concern is the possibility that a coder (demoscene or otherwise) develop keeping the legacy timings as the foundation, but the new features MIGHT have unforseen consequences.

Indeed, if stuff works on the Apollo then everything is fine. But if it doesn't, then it's the Apollo Core that needs to be fixed, not the software.

And regarding the additional features, like AMMX/SuperAGA/whatever, I understand that from the Apollo-people's perspective they might be fun to implement. But trying to hype up the Vampire with these features might be a bit misleading to the consumers, as those are features that most likely will not see much support on the software side (other than in the form of datatypes, libraries and possible cgx/p96/ahi drivers).

But then again, it's the Apollo-teams choice and they're free to do what they please with their own product, I can always vote with my wallet and just not buy said product.

[Britelite]

With regards to the AMMX and other stuff; even if thats included, does that matter to YOU as long as it doesnt affect your own productions?

Nope, I couldn't care less for these features. I'm maybe more annoyed by people complaining about (demo)coders not wanting to make use of them

EDIT: Pretty much the same reason why I'm not really into the PPC-side of things either

[Britelite]

That aside; you shouldnt really attribute to the Apollo/Vampire project what some daydreamers say or think. Its not Gunnars fault that some expect you or others to press ESC and suddenly a full megademo magically appears.

Well, let's just say that Gunnar is definitely not making attracting developers to the Vampire/Apollo any easier either

[Britelite]

You dont like to be told to code a demo, or what platform you use. And you have said that it takes away some of your intrest/joy of coding.

Indeed, it's something I do as a hobby.

Maybe a similar reactionpattern can be attributed to a team like Apollo, that has spent xx hours producing this product, only to have xyz people tell them its not good enough etc.

Sure, but as far as I can tell the Apollo Core is something they at least at some point want to make money on, in which case they might actually want to listen more closely to the people they want to attract to be able to make profit.

[Britelite]

What are the limitations or design directions you would want Apollo to embrace?

Let's put it this way, I was very interested in the Vampire in the beginning when it was presented just as a speedy accelerator without any additional bells and whistles. When more and more (in my opinion unnecessary) features got added I quickly lost interest. Mainly because it seems like the aim is to achieve a vendor lock-in, hoping that developers would jump on the Apollo-bandwagon and abandon Amiga, making way for their own platform.

But as to your question, if there was a mode available that disables ALL additional stuff and mimics the 060 at 50 or 66MHz as close as possible, I would be very interested. The thing is, if I make something aimed at the 060, it runs on all 040/060 cards, UAE and hopefully Apollo Core. If I use ANY of the Apollo-features my software ONLY works on the Apollo, which for me is not good. And I know quite a few other coders feel the same way.

Maybe a 060-only mode will be available some day, who knows. But until then it's just not for me.

EDIT: And considering the core itself is still a moving platform, I wouldn't dare make any low level code on it yet and risk it not working on some later revision.

[Britelite]

Again, as a enduser, I actually enjoy the "bells and whistles", but we obviously have different uses for hardware, and the perspective decides how we view it.

I fully understand you, as an enduser I would also of course want as much bang for the buck when it comes to hardware. It's just a shame that most of it will most likely be left unutilized (with the exception of previously mentioned datatypes, libraries and rtg/ahi-drivers).

Thanks for all the beautiful demos you have developed over the years

And there's still more to come

[Britelite]

Brit Elite, while I find most of what you write very reasonable, I don't understand why it disturbs you that the Apollo Core has some features the 060 does not have. You can safely ignore their presence.

Let's put it this way, if I were to use the Apollo Core for development (as in doing stuff for 68k machines in general), I would constantly have to double check that everything actually runs on a real machine, as there's always the chance that something doesn't behave exactly like on the real chipset (I had to do the same years ago when I used an AGA-machine to develop OCS-stuff). Being able to disable ALL additional features would of course solve this problem for me.

So, it's just easier for me to save the hassle and ignore the Apollo Core altogether, also considering there's really no interesting Apollo-exclusive software available.

[Britelite]

I'm not sure it would solve the problem. It's not that you would accidentally use RTG-chunky instead of bitplanes or use ten bitplanes instead of eight or whatever. You wouldn't accidentally use 080-only processor instructions either.

On the CPU-side I don't think it would be much of a problem, but if SuperAGA has any overlapping bits/registers compared to real AGA (for example, using unused bits in the current registers), then there most certainly could be problems. Adding a RTG chunkybuffer is not a problem, but reimplementing AGA with added bells and whistles is, at least for me.

The problem is that you would have to trust the reimplementation to be true to the original. The same happens with WinUAE and the real hardware.

To be honest, I have way more trust in WinUAE than in any reimplementation. Mainly because the goals are different, WinUAE tries to be as close to the original hardware as possible where as Apollo Core wants to be compatible but also add a lot of features.

But I feel this conversation isn't moving anywhere, the Apollo Core in it's current form just isn't for me.