Sign of life of Apollo FPGA project

[kolla]

gunnar had promised that there will be options for all models. But you have to start somewhere

Gunnar has not promised anything, stop using that word! Besides, he is not the one doing the hardware, his hope is that Apollo will become defacto standard CPU core for Amiga, and that others will license his core for their acc card products.

[kolla]

I am not worried, the grand plan will never happen, at "best" it just cause yet another split in the community, and in time more compatible open source cores will take over anyways.

And I repeat - all we have is _talk_ that this and that is implemented - or rather, that it is _decided_ to _become_ implemented. So far I have yet to see any concrete evidence of anything when it comes to actual compatibility and the features claimed.

[kolla]

remember the long quarrel about movep and that it finally got implemented without any further discussion.

"it finally got implemented" you say. Or maybe he decided that it would be a cool thing to announce, who knows...

[kolla]

Seriously?
You may need professional help.

No, I have been following this quite carefully. He has explicitly not been promising anything, only suggesting possibilities. All the "promises" are made up by people who read his stuff and then go on to boards like here and elsewhere, saying "they have promised HDMI output!!", "He promised hardware X, Y and Z". No-one in the Apollo team has promised anything.

[kolla]

Other open source cores will likely become more advanced and faster but not to the level of the Apollo core.

Why? Really, why do you say so? Are you saying Gunnar is some sort of uniq wizard with supernatural abilities?

The fastest FPGA Arcade and Mist cores (based off the TG68) will likely never exceed 68040 performance while the Apollo core has already exceeded 68060 performance and approaches the performance of the best ColdFire hard processors in an affordable FPGA of Majsta's latest accelerator.

So what? FPGA Arcade are here and now, MIST is already in its 3rd incarnation, and why would it be the final edition? As these boards gets more popular, people experiment more, demands increase etc.

The nice thing is that FPGA gives people the freedom to choose, the individual uer can chose to use TG68 or Apollo or whatever there will be on his FPGA system, be it an accelerator for a real Amiga, or a stand alone board.

I have every reason to believe that the Apollo core technology is real and is a unique opportunity for the Amiga to become relevant and affordable again.

Relevant how? The operating system is irrelevant, the software is irrelevant, the relevant games and applications are already reimplemented or ported or even emulated on relevant systems.

Leadership and investment are lacking in the "grand plan" so you are probably correct in your pessimism.

Frustration leads to pessimism, pessimism leads to anger, anger leads to the dark side. You are obviously an intelligent person so why are you so unjustifiably negative?

I am not pessimist, I know that it will all go well. I am merely eyerolling over the delusionism in the community, it is not being negative, it is being realistic.

I am in this for the fun and entertainment :laughing:

[kolla]

Btw - something I want to look into, is to modify the Amiga core and build one that is less about accurate emulation of chipset to support every thinkable game under the sun, but rather implement features so called "hi end" productivity users care about, things like RTG and RTA, high speed I/O, high speed network options etc.

[kolla]

If I recall correctly, the Vampire boards are open sourced hardware. The "problem" is the expanded Apollo core that is proprietary. It may seem that the Grand Plan is to attempty to create a new de-facto proprietary 68k CPU for Amiga, a CPU core that can be licensed by hardware manufactorers from Gunnar.