To Vampire or not

[psxphill]

Also he repeated a lot of times to only buy the Vampire for the features it has NOW and not for the features it might have in the future.

People seem to think they have some magical right to demand things and tell professionals what they should do. Buy a product that fits your demands and budget.

You seem to be berating people for agreeing with him that you shouldn't buy one unless it fits your needs now. It is not compatible with the 68030/68040 or 68060 MMU & FPU. So it certainly won't be going on my shopping list any time soon, I just hoped it would.

[psxphill]

My understanding is that the FPU is a LOT of work to test. It is almost as complex as the CPU core. So do they hold all the other features up while the FPU is worked on,

If the claim is true that it's done, but needs testing & they don't have time to test it. Then it would seem kinda logical to release it and see if someone external would test it.

Alternatively, release documentation so that other people can port their own code to the boards.

[psxphill]

And as about 20% of all Amiga software supports an FPU, its entirely possible that software specifically designed with AROS in mind could exceed that percentage.

Using floating point variables is very common because (at least at some point) some x86 fpu operations were faster than integer & it is essentially lossy compression, which helps cache hits.

Obviously you can compile them to use software routines, or you could trap the errors and then patch the code. But the current line is that FPU will come eventually, so doing anything other than waiting seems a waste of resources. If the line is just a diversion tactic then it does mean that we lose out in the long term, but you can't control people.

[psxphill]

The 080 in the Vampire is derived from the Apollo Core which doesn't mean it is identical to it.

Sounds like you got a weasel lawyer to come up with that one. Using that argument completely destroys any hope that the project could ever produce something that I would want to buy.

It's a shame.

[psxphill]

Zorro1 == A500/1000 sideport == 68000 bus

Zorro2 == Zorro1 + some stuff for autoconfig

No, that is wrong.

the A500/A1000 expansion port is roughly equivalent to the CPU slot in the A2000.

Zorro 1 = square expansion cards that were used in ranger prototype & byte by byte pal/pal jr

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1363

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/paljr

http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/prototype-found-amiga-ranger/

Notice how Garganturam is used on both & byte by byte were using the A2090 prototype which wasn't finished. I would love to know more details about that deal.

Zorro 2 = Zorro 1 using ISA card form factor.

The rationale was that lots of companies were making ISA cards, so it would be cheaper to make Zorro 2 cards the same form factor. It may also have had something to do with commodore germany loving PC's & wanting the A2000 to have Zorro 2 and ISA slots.

I don't know if Zorro 1 was called that, or if it was just Zorro.

Well, then please understand that before the Vampire 2 there was a Vampire 1 and that had (as an alternative to the tg68 it came with) another core that was derived from the Apollo Core. Because of space constraints of the tiny FPGA it was single-scalar and only had partial 020 Support (and, of course, no FPU). How does this fit with your approach Apollo Core == Vampire core?

Vampire 2 had a bigger FPGA, so it didn't need to use the cut down Vampire 1 core. That doesn't really help whatever it is your argument is.