Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4

[psxphill]

On the other hand, these people are mostly doing it for not a lot, if they want to have some fun (likely hardware ALU blocks on the FPGA made wiring up AMMX a lot easier than doing a full FPU implementation) who am I to complain...

Gunnar may not be making much money now, but he has always been clear that he wants to market his softcore to the embedded market and that he makes decisions based on that rather than every single piece of 30 year old Amiga software. It's in his interest to appeal to the type of people who will evangelise his core.

The friction comes in because there are enough people who will be happy to see vampire as an expensive whdload card, with the added promise of the Amiga having completely new development that will make it viable against PC's. They fight off anyone who tries to get FPU/MMU on the table because they are scared that it will upset Gunnar. Who sees this support and has no reason to expand his base, because it's enough.

Which cuts out software that would actually quite cool to run. Because it's closed source, because of the embedded licensing, then Gunnar is able to exert whatever control he wants.

Hopefully someone else will produce a core for the vampire that does appeal to me.

[psxphill]

-I enjoy being able to run Workbench RTG/Thru HDMI without Indivision.

Why do you hate Indivision?

[psxphill]

Who says I hate Indivision?

You said that you enjoyed using HDMI without Indivision, which implies that using HDMI with Indivision wasn't enjoyable.

If you were neutral about Indivision then you wouldn't have mentioned it.

How do you think your girlfriend would feel if you said "I enjoy going to the cinema without my girlfriend".

That has been kind of the point we've been making, and I don't know about you, but I feel like I've been butting my head against a wall.
'Sounds like a good idea, if compatibility with standard fpu and mmu operations is incorporated into the design'.

I still don't see why that is an unreasonable request.

It appears to me that all requests are considered unreasonable, because if it was reasonable then Gunnar would have implemented it already.

He has previously said that he wants to sell apollo as an embedded softcore, similar to arm, where most people don't need 680x0 fpu and mmu compatibility. Even if he targeted people looking for a coldfire or cpu32 replacement, most of them didn't have an fpu or mmu and those that did weren't 680x0 compatible either. This is his justification, you would need to show that there is money to be made by supporting them. He only needs enough people in the Amiga market to prove that his design works & there are enough people that overlook the lack of fpu & mmu to achieve that.

If apollo does take off like arm has, then I think it's incredibly likely that he'll walk away from the ungrateful Amiga market and take his closed source code with him.

[psxphill]

The logical leap from "I enjoy being able to run Workbench RTG/Thru HDMI without Indivision" to this is almost impressive.

No, it's exactly what was written. I cannot be held responsible if english is not your first language.

It's a much bigger leap from:

"I enjoy being able to run Workbench RTG/Thru HDMI without Indivision"

to:

"I enjoy Jens's hardware, and as I said, it has served its purpose. But compared to the userfriendliness of Vampire it has its shortcomings. That is obviously not only down to the Indivision, but the fact that my Blizzard 030 lacks the power to run Workbench well enough when you increase the resolution and colors+music in the background."

Which is still not clear why vampire hdmi output is more enjoyable than Indivision. If it's only the CPU the affects it then it nullifies the point entirely.

Making the girlfriend argument is pure bullcrap.

My interpretation is the correct english interpretation, there are no magic get out clauses because one is a person.

Here is another analogy: "I enjoy going out without my phone". It's safe to infer that you don't enjoy going out WITH your phone, or you'd write the sentence differently.

You either meant what you wrote or you didn't. Being so defensive about it makes it look like I was right, I'm prepared to accept that you didn't really think about what you wrote and you like being abusive when questioned.

[psxphill]

No. It's not safe to infer that at all. It is totally possible to enjoy going out without your phone and enjoy going out with your phone. Also, that statement in no way implies that you hate your phone, as you seem to think.

If you enjoyed both then you wouldn't bother specifying it, OR expect that people who do understand english would not be able to understand you.

I'm not sure "exactly" means what you think it means. Niding never even used the word "hate" and a reasonable person would not draw the conclusion that he does.

He didn't use the word hate, but it's an antonym of enjoy. Which he implied in the way he wrote the sentence.

To whom? I am pretty sure that you only speak for yourself in this matter, and why should anyone care what you think?

Ah, so it's ok to bully the person who bothers to learn english. Gotcha.

Here are a couple of other examples: I enjoy taking a bath, I enjoy a cold beer and I enjoy being awake. Is it safe to infer that mean I *hate* not taking a bath, *hate* not drinking and *hate* sleeping?

No it's not safe to infer that, but your analogies aren't relevant as they don't cover the "without ...".

If he'd said "I enjoy Workbench RTG/HDMI" then that is equivalent to "I enjoy taking a bath".

If you said "I enjoy taking a bath without hot water" then it changes when you enjoy taking the bath to only include the times there is no hot water.

If you meant something like "I can enjoy taking a bath without hot water", "I sometimes enjoy taking a bath without hot water" or "I prefer taking a bath without hot water". Then you should say so. If instead the temperature of the water is irrelevant, then it's weird to even mention it.

Words mean something, it's impossible to know if someone used the wrong words or meant what they wrote. If you're vague then don't get defensive if someone questions what you meant. It's pretty pointless to guess what someone means and then argue that that is what they definitely meant.

[psxphill]

Not what I'm saying at all.  I'm just saying they would likely not adjust their course to placate a small number of people when the vast majority are happy with their current feature roadmap.  Again, their success speaks for itself.

Yes, like Microsoft Windows on x86 was more successful than Amiga on 68000.. Wait....

[psxphill]

Not following the analogy.  I think Gunnar is listening to his market.

C= certainly didn't, and paid the ultimate price.

Gunnar doesn't appear to listen to his market, the market is so desperate that they are listening to him.

The analogy is that just because people buy things, doesn't mean it's any good.

Also if it were better (i.e. compatible fpu and mmu) then more people would want it. Unless you are saying they purposefully crippled the design to reduce demand.

That does fit my observations that apollo isn't meant for amiga, this is just a test ground so people can do his QA and marketing and then he'll be off.

FWIW Commodore also had more people wanting to buy hardware than they could produce. It was the XOR patent license fee that did them in, not a lack of customers.

[psxphill]

Gunnar knows enough about the Amiga to build one from scratch. Why do you think he does not know what needs with regard to compatibility there are?

Because of his refusal to produce a compatible fpu and mmu.

The final core will have FPU and MMU.

He has repeatedly said that it won't have a compatible one. Even the disabled fpu doesn't produce the same results as a real fpu, because of his design.

Accordingly the scarce development resources are being used for developing the chipset.

It's simple. He is only wasting scarce resources on developing SAGA because he can't use code from minimig/replay because he's keeping apollo closed source for his intended commercial use.

I know you want to believe the best in him and I don't actually blame him for wanting to make money. I just think it's a pain in the arse as I don't think he'll succeed in the embedded market and it would be nicer if he'd focus on compatibility first. Apollo core in minimig on replay would be awesome, if we had the code then we could make changes where we don't like his decisions.