Apollo Team Activity Report: GOLD 2.7 core, GOLD 3 core, Vampire V4

Apollo team has released an activity report on their forum website, addressing some current issues, like the halted Vampire V2 600 production, as well as ongoing new developments.

Some highlights from their report:

- GOLD 2.7 includes faster IDE, hardware sprites, optimized rewrite of RTG graphics driver, MapROM functionality, hybrid software/hardware FPU, HyperThreading, and more

- GOLD 2.7 core will be available for Vampire V2 500, V2 600, and V4

- GOLD 3 will bring AGA support to OCS/ECS Amigas, and seems to be routing Paula-audio to the HDMI output

- a list of non-Amiga website reports about the Vampire V4, which boldly shows that the outside world does take notice

Judging from the list of new features of the GOLD 2.7 core users can expect a major overall increase in performance.


Especially the Apollo core's current lack of an FPU is a crucial difference to "real" M68k based accelerators (with an FPU), but it looks as these days will soon be gone. It'll be interesting how the other manufacturers of accelerator boards will react to this - namely: phase 5 - as they now have some serious competition when it comes to floating-point number crunching.

Again, Apollo team has given us some spectacular report on their progress. Together with the latest phase 5 announcements this makes 2017 probably the most exciting Amiga year since the turn of the millenium!

Sources:
forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1822

BANG! There it is: Vampire V4 standalone & Vampire V4 Amiga 1200

And this is how things happen. You have an Apollo team, and a Vampire team, and Kipper2k and Majsta and all the others, and they just go the way, all the way.

Today has been announced Vampire V4, and what a beast it is: it comes in different flavours, including an Amiga 1200 version, and a standalone version.

Among it's features are the Altera Cyclone V A5 FPGA, 512MB DDR3 RAM, FastIDE with two connectors (40 and 44-pin), HDMI* video out, dual Kickstart-flashrom, USB, ethernet, and MicroSD storage. Additionally, the standalone version will feature two DB9 mouse/joystick ports.

From the official announcement: "The Vampire V4 standalone system will be a complete new Amiga system powered by the 68080 CPU core and the complete SAGA chipset (AGA compatible)."

Probably most interesting are three I/O ports on the new Vampire V4. Currently we have no information about these, but could this be the basis for a new standard of Amiga expansion devices? Will this be what people build upon, and make the Vampire V4 the new Amiga?

It has to be said, though, that there's some sort of question mark regarding the Amiga 600 version of the Vampire boards. The announcement of the V4 says "Amiga 600 with kippa’s adapter (if produced)", and assuming that "kippa" is "kipper2k", things don't look too well: recently, kipper2k left a note on his website (see sources, below) that he doesn't intend to continue making the Vampire 600 boards. Let's just hope this doesn't affect the overall roadmap of the Vampire boards, and that someone will build the adapter for the V4 600.

Anyway, exciting times we live in!

Congratulations!

  

http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/images/v4.jpg

*) probably, see sources below

Sources: 
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2017-08-00003-DE.html
http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/files/V4_announcement_v1_5.pdf
http://forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1804
http://kipper2k.com

Vampire V2 / Apollo-Core GOLD3 boldy goes AGA chipset emulation!

Here's the next step in Vampire/Apollo-core development, and what an important step it is: Amiga-chipset emulation, namely AGA, is making good progress - now Vampire boards can do AGA graphics and audio via HDMI!

Once again, and finally, it looks like it's really happening: the looooong overdue update of the Amiga's screenmodes and connection capabilities in regard to modern displays.

Additionally, some programs - probably mostly games - will benefit from this new stage of Apollo-core in a specific way: due to not only the super-fast CPU-emulation but also the new AGA-emulation both residing on the Vampire now, there's no need for "turtle mode" anymore - in other words: the CPU doesn't have to wait for the slow Amiga-mainboard chipset blitter anymore, giving huge performance boosts to blitter-heavy applications.

AGA chipset emulation is still work in progress (e.g. currently PAL only), and hasn't been released to the public yet, but you can already watch some impressive demo videos:

Vampire 600 V2 / GOLD3 "No more turtle mode", parts 1 and 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYxEFUgWe1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q_rfkqPymg

Source:
http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=6563

A new Amiga...?!

With the Vampire accelerator boards out and in mass production, and AROS gaining momentum on m68k, it has been announced that the Apollo/Vampire team will open-source their S-AGA enhanced Amiga-compatible chipset!

This means that other companies can reuse and build upon this new, compatible Amiga chipset implementation without worrying about license fees, copyright holders, or future safety.

AROS is already open-source, and AROS amiga-m68k is running on the Vampire boards, providing a free operating system. (It still needs optimization for the S-AGA chipset, though.)

Yes, it looks like it's finally happening: a new, open-source 68k-Amiga.

AROS-m68k running on Amiga Vampire 500

Sources:
http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=5768
http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=5580