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Important Roadmap Update From Apollo Teampage  1 2 

Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
04 Jul 2021 18:38


Important Roadmap Update from Apollo Team, July 4th 2021.
 
“Apollo Team strives for long-term consistency, stability and harmony. Our single mission always was and always will be to revive the Amiga. Today Apollo Team announces the next level in our roadmap with the introduction of a future proof line-up of Amiga accelerator cards based on the powerful and robust V4 architecture.
Part of this new and exciting phase is a withdrawal of our high respected team member Igor and the reunion of the talented Thomas Hirsch (Mr. NATAMI) in our team.”

 
 
A little Apollo history
 
Nearly six years have passed since we proudly shipped our first Apollo Vampire board. From that moment on our hardware portfolio has greatly evolved and the complete Apollo Team has worked with unlimited passion to bring up all the cards to the level of today. This progress has only been possible with the help of all our loyal and patient customers helping us with reporting bugs and improving the user experience.
In the year 2014 the Apollo Team created the compact V2-V600 together with Igor responsible for layout/production of the PCB and the rest of the Team in charge of the 68080 core, AMMX/SAGA chipsets, bus controller and drivers. In 2015 in the same constellation the now world famous V2-V500 was released which after several revisions over time in 2018 reached its final 2.3 version. In 2019 the revolutionary Vampire Standalone V4 was introduced, designed by Gunnar and Chris and manufactured by Apollo Computer. Finally in 2019 Igor started his production of the V1200 accelerator for Amiga 1200. With that accelerator finally the 68080 AMMX Core become accessible to 1200 users.
Since the beginning of this amazing journey all the Apollo products have generated significant interest from Amiga fans new and old, which makes us really happy and proud!
 
Igor has handled the production of the V2 accelerator cards since the beginning. He did the PCB design and worked closely together with the Apollo Team through many steps and improvements while producing those cards. The Apollo Core used in the FPGA for the Vampire Cards, designed by Gunnar, gave the V2 accelerators an unmatched performance. It was the combination of Igor’s PCB, Gunnar’s core, and the chipsets and software developed by the incredible and dedicated Apollo Team members that have made these cards a reality.
 
Initial accelerator card production was done solely by Igor, who produced boards by hand. The volume of production and sales was small, and so this volume was manageable. However during the last couple of years Igor has been unable to meet demand for the accelerator cards and this has resulted in a high-stress high-workload, which has taken a personal toll. Igor has now withdrawn himself from active participation in Apollo Team in recent weeks, we want to thank him deeply for his dedication and wish him good health  and all the best for the future.
With Igor’s withdrawal, Apollo-Team has to change the roadmap for the recently announced Raptor accelerator, which was in joint development with Igor.
 
V2 End of Sale
The Vampire V2 line comes out of the Apollo Team product catalog.  The C3 FPGA and corresponding components on the V2 family are overdue for quite some time now. Igor is currently selling his remaining PCB and FPGA stock. He will still assume warranties for the cards he sold.
There are significant amounts of backorders remaining for V2-500 and V2-1200. We fully understand that many of you have been waiting for an exceedingly long time on getting your hands on these cards.
So the Apollo Team is releasing the next-generation V4-based accelerator cards produced at scale in Germany to fulfill these orders. We want to say thank you for your patience, and we can now share details of these exciting new cards.
With honors to the Apollo V2 family now going end of sale we introduce our new family of accelerators based on the highly successful V4 Stand Alone computer, unifying the hardware architectures of the established premium 68k Amiga-compatible computer and accelerator cards.
 
 
V4 Family Introduction
Apollo Team proudly introduces the new V4-based Apollo FireBird (A-500/A1000/A2000) and IceDrake (A1200) with unique values:
Based on the proven powerful V4 architecture
  High Quality German production, software and support 
  High Volume production; we will clear the all waiting lists very quick!
  All components are future-proof and available
  High-performance 512MB DDR3 memory
  Additional features:
  16bit Audio
  2x IDE port for CF and CD-ROM
  100 MBit Ethernet
  USB Joypad support
  C5  FPGA (V4) with twice the capacity of the C3 (V2)
 
 
Apollo Team is fully committed to support a highly requested feature for these new accelerator cards: output of the native Amiga screen modes over DIGITAL-VIDEO output. This will require substantial R&D and we will update you with progress when we have more details to share.
 
 
While we can disclose that the Apollo Team is already testing operational prototypes of the next-generation accelerators, the reality is that there is still development work to be done before they are ready for large scale commercial production. Fortunately, we can build on the high-quality production line already in place for the V4 cards in Germany, and thus guarantee rapid upscaling of manufacture when production gets underway in Q4 2021/Q1 2022. The Apollo FireBird will be available first, followed closely by Apollo IceDrake .
 
We wish to thank every one of our customers that have waited patiently for so long! Thank you for your dedication. We will revive Amiga together!
 
On behalf of the whole Apollo - Team,
Gunnar & Miri


Mateusz S.

Posts 53
04 Jul 2021 19:30


So, the Vampire family is getting bigger and bigger - thats great!
Mass production of new card - can be a gamechanger - more people will get their card sonner. Thats also good news.

One of my concern is: will the SAGA on V4 for A1200 will override the native AGA chips? Can the user be able to switch the SAGA off?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
04 Jul 2021 19:31


Mateusz S. wrote:

One of my concern is: will the SAGA on V4 for A1200 will override the native AGA chips? Can the user be able to switch the SAGA off?

You misunderstand this.
There is nothing overridden.
You have your native output as always on your old Amiga.
But you also have the SAGA output allowing you to see truecolor, allowing you to play all the new games like Apollo-Blocks, ApolloCrown, Jake and Peppy and many more.
 
And you can promote the Amiga display - to also come out on the DIGITAL-VIDEO. 


Mateusz S.

Posts 53
04 Jul 2021 19:41


Thanks, thats good news!


Roland V

Posts 7
04 Jul 2021 19:57


Vampire running AGA on an A1200 would be cool, because you could finally remove your second monitor or remove the the Indivision or other scan doublers.


Jd 64

Posts 41
04 Jul 2021 20:03


Will the A1200-V4 need it's own core release or will we be able to use the existing V4 core?



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
04 Jul 2021 20:10


jd 64 wrote:

Will the A1200-V4 need it's own core release or will we be able to use the existing V4 core?

They will have own cores.
But the cores are very close to each other and are fully compatible and can support all software.


Kriz Antikriz

Posts 27
04 Jul 2021 21:00


Thx for detailed roadmap update! I have to give my respect to Igor, amazing work on the V1200 card and hope you now can rest and take care, too much work and stress is not good in the long run..

Cheers all!


Ali B.

Posts 24
04 Jul 2021 21:08


I hope that the “personal toll” Igor had to pay is not having permanent effects and things will sort themselves out for him, soon. I am enjoying the Vampire he has built very much. My thanks to him and all the best.
It would be nice if he or the rest of the team could indicate, that he aside the story above is okayish.
Ali


Simo Koivukoski
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 601
04 Jul 2021 22:03


Many thanks for Igor and team members who wrote drivers and apps, did testing and made this all possible! It was the result of many years of daily work.


Sean Sk

Posts 488
05 Jul 2021 01:24


First off, I just wanted to say that it will be sad to see Igor depart from the production side of things with the Apollo Team. He was a real nice person to deal with and very helpful.

It's understandable that he needs to step away from the project if it is becoming stressful as no one should have to experience that kind of thing. Nevertheless, I hope that he will stick around on the forums and perhaps still play some part in contributing ideas and suggestions.

Thanks Igor for all your hard work!!

Just a question: Will we continue to see core updates, bug fixes and compatibility improvements for the V2 line of accelerators?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
05 Jul 2021 07:03


sean sk wrote:

Just a question: Will we continue to see core updates, bug fixes and compatibility improvements for the V2 line of accelerators?

The cores for the V2 are very stable, and very few updates came out in the last years.
This has two reasons
A) The 68080 runs very good, and no bugs are known to fix them.
B) The FPGA on the V500/V600 is rather full. This makes updates very hard.

For the V500/600 no updates are planned.
For the V1200 we plan to enable APOLLO-SHIELD support.



FRAXINOUS Eric
(Needs Verification)
Posts 48/ 1
05 Jul 2021 07:59


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

 
    The cores for the V2 are very stable, and very few updates came out in the last years.
    This has two reasons
    A) The 68080 runs very good, and no bugs are known to fix them.
    B) The FPGA on the V500/V600 is rather full. This makes updates very hard.
   
    For the V500/600 no updates are planned.
    For the V1200 we plan to enable APOLLO-SHIELD support.
   
 

  There are still some bugs on V1200. Are you planning to correct them ? Is it usefull to continue to report bugs as no fix seems to be done ? Sorry to be a little rude but i reported a lot of bug in the past but nothing has been done... I use previous v1200 core as the lastest doesn't work correctly (see the lastest topic on V1200 bugs : http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=5&note=35441).


Peter Heginbotham

Posts 214
05 Jul 2021 08:14


Will there be any further updates to the SAGA drivers for the V2 line or is 2.5.1 the last version


Ray Couzens

Posts 93
05 Jul 2021 08:38


Good to hear Mr Natami has joined the team!


Lorenzo Pistone

Posts 22
05 Jul 2021 09:46


Hi, it will be possible to include the SATA support for the next models?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
05 Jul 2021 09:48


Lorenzo Pistone wrote:

Hi, it will be possible to include the SATA support for the next models?

The next models are already done.
All card have the same spec as the V4.

This gives users the advantage that you can run all Software on them.
Including new games like "JAKE AND PEPPY", "APOLLO-BLOCKS", "APOLLO-CROWN", and many more to come.

And it makes it easier for software developers as all cards have the same features. All have 16bit audio, all have 512MB memory.
Being able to use everywhere the same features does simplifie coding a lot.


FRAXINOUS Eric
(Needs Verification)
Posts 48/ 1
05 Jul 2021 10:15


I see that when i ask a question, i still haven't any response....
Ok, i note that it's not necessary to report bugs anymore... Don't be affraid, it's my last post on this forum... I'll not annoying you anymore...


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
05 Jul 2021 10:23


FRAXINOUS Eric wrote:

I see that when i ask a question, i still haven't any response....
  Ok, i note that it's not necessary to report bugs anymore... Don't be affraid, it's my last post on this forum... I'll not annoying you anymore...

You need to open another thread for bug report. Please do this.
In my experience often WHDLOAD issues are related to "settings".
They need be discussed one by one. And each time you OS used  Kick and settings need be changed and verified.



Uber Freak

Posts 22
05 Jul 2021 14:11


I created a thread some weeks back about WHDLoad issues on the V1200.
But its not only WHDload, I see the same issues when trying to run the same demos without WHDLoad.
Igor uploaded a video showing it runs ok on his V1200, but other members also reported the same issues.



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