Overview Features Coding ApolloOS Performance Forum Downloads Products Order Contact

Welcome to the Apollo Forum

This forum is for people interested in the APOLLO CPU.
Please read the forum usage manual.
Please visit our Apollo-Discord Server for support.



All TopicsNewsPerformanceGamesDemosApolloVampireAROSWorkbenchATARIReleases
Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Any Chance for a Vampire Core for MISTer?page  1 2 

Adam Polkosnik

Posts 30
01 Jul 2019 21:04


I was wondering if there's a chance for a core that could be running on MISTer?
I would be willing to pay money to get a Vampirized core for MISTer, I don't care much if you'd do one time online activation or otherwise tie it to a single board (it has a built in NIC card, so the MAC is unique, etc) or a license file that's good for a year to fund the development further.

Thanks!


Claudio Guglielmotti
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 185
01 Jul 2019 21:28


for a moment I thought you were asking the core for the first Vampire, with the Cyclone2 !


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
01 Jul 2019 21:33


Sadly, not possible. One has to go Vampire ways.


Adam Polkosnik

Posts 30
02 Jul 2019 00:11


claudio guglielmotti wrote:

  for a moment I thought you were asking the core for the first Vampire, with the Cyclone2 !

Haha, nah MISTer runs on Cyclone V SE EXTERNAL LINK


Adam A

Posts 130
02 Jul 2019 01:37


this has been discussed previously, there are some issues like, the availability of the de10-nano board in future, importing a core for a board that may not be available in future or have no control on its production could be a problem

even with an activation license, it can possibly be cracked and this will may affect the future development of the core

I own a mister.mist but im a die-hard Amiga fan and i think if it ever happed, its going to be a big mistake


Adam Polkosnik

Posts 30
02 Jul 2019 02:09


Adam  A wrote:

  this has been discussed previously, there are some issues like, the availability of the de10-nano board in future, importing a core for a board that may not be available in future or have no control on its production could be a problem
 
  even with an activation license, it can possibly be cracked and this will may affect the future development of the core
 
  I own a mister.mist but im a die-hard Amiga fan and i think if it ever happed, its going to be a big mistake
 

  I'm not getting your reasoning. At this stage, I've had it with the stupid vendor lock-ins. Life is too short, for such things.
 
  If there was a way to attach 68080 to whatever is out there for other FPGAs. How would that be a big mistake? What bothers me is that people are trying to choke the supply of the good tech rather than just releasing it and getting more issues uncovered earlier rather than later. If somebody is willing to pay money for alpha or beta quality, just let them in a subscription model. Everyone wins.
 
 


Adam A

Posts 130
02 Jul 2019 03:20


I cant think of much other fpgas that use cyclone 5, and what benefit would this give over the stand alone version?

the standalone version is perfectly designed for Amiga, and it may possibly  support other 68k consoles/computer cores

I remember when mister killed mist, the same to consequence could happen to mister and then thats another problem for developers




Renee Cousins
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 142
02 Jul 2019 03:35


Adam Polkosnik wrote:
If there was a way to attach 68080 to whatever is out there for other FPGAs. How would that be a big mistake? What bothers me is that people are trying to choke the supply of the good tech rather than just releasing it and getting more issues uncovered earlier rather than later. If somebody is willing to pay money for alpha or beta quality, just let them in a subscription model. Everyone wins.

One option would be a 64DIP adapter to a DE10. Emulate whatever you want there and have the Vampire be the CPU. You don't have to have access to the source to use it.


Renee Cousins
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 142
02 Jul 2019 03:52


Adam  A wrote:
the standalone version is perfectly designed for Amiga, and it may possibly  support other 68k consoles/computer cores

This sounds a little like fan fiction.

Adam  A wrote:
I remember when mister killed mist, the same to consequence could happen to mister and then thats another problem for developers

MiSTer development is already fading, but I don't believe Terasic will be going anywhere any time soon.


Adam Polkosnik

Posts 30
02 Jul 2019 04:23


Renee Cousins wrote:

Adam Polkosnik wrote:
If there was a way to attach 68080 to whatever is out there for other FPGAs. How would that be a big mistake? What bothers me is that people are trying to choke the supply of the good tech rather than just releasing it and getting more issues uncovered earlier rather than later. If somebody is willing to pay money for alpha or beta quality, just let them in a subscription model. Everyone wins.

 
  One option would be a 64DIP adapter to a DE10. Emulate whatever you want there and have the Vampire be the CPU. You don't have to have access to the source to use it.

Haha good one.


Marlon Beijer

Posts 182
02 Jul 2019 05:09


I don't see what's wrong here. He's actually saying he'd pay for the core to be ported. If he has the funds for the team to put in the hours to get it running, then that's up to him and the team to discuss.

However porting the standalone core over to de10-nano won't be a quick task done in just a couple of hours, and would take time away from their main task, so it probably won't be as cheap as OP thinks.


Eric Gus

Posts 477
02 Jul 2019 05:53


Renee Cousins wrote:

  MiSTer development is already fading, but I don't believe Terasic will be going anywhere any time soon.
 

 
  I dont know if its fading.. seems to have some degree of momentum these days .. I think the bulk of the old Mist cores have been migrated so if you are comparing activity to those days when new cores were showing up in bunches every day .. then ok, sure .. but if you look at the near graveyard MIST development is to MiSTer .. its vastly way more active .. (even with the recent uptick in a few one offs in the MiST universe). What I see going on now with MiSTer is many cores are now getting reworked, more features added, getting expanded, the core of the MiSTer itself is getting more features at a good clip (like software midi synth/TCPSER etc..)
 


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
02 Jul 2019 05:53


Adam Polkosnik wrote:

I was wondering if there's a chance for a core that could be running on MISTer?

Yes, in theory yes.

Porting the core will take significant time and effort.
If people pay us this time, then we can talk about this.

As side note:
I have myself some high end FPGA boards here (with Stratix). Those would be able to reach 400 MIPS in Sysinfo.
But I never cared to port the core because the effort is not justified for one user.

On the Vampire there is a significant user base.
(Thousands) and the Vampire is continuously produced.
And will also continue to be produced in the future.
We regularly produce core updates with improvement for the Vampire.

For a new FPGA system to support I would like to also see this.
a) Continous support from the team
b) big enough user base to justify this
c) a roadmap from the FPGA card producer to guarantee that the cards will be produced the coming years




Renee Cousins
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 142
02 Jul 2019 22:19


eric gus wrote:

Renee Cousins wrote:

    MiSTer development is already fading, but I don't believe Terasic will be going anywhere any time soon.
 

 
  I dont know if its fading.. seems to have some degree of momentum these days .. I think the bulk of the old Mist cores have been migrated so if you are comparing activity to those days when new cores were showing up in bunches every day .. then ok, sure .. but if you look at the near graveyard MIST development is to MiSTer .. its vastly way more active .. (even with the recent uptick in a few one offs in the MiST universe). What I see going on now with MiSTer is many cores are now getting reworked, more features added, getting expanded, the core of the MiSTer itself is getting more features at a good clip (like software midi synth/TCPSER etc..)
 

Specifically with regards to MiniMig-AGA, development has fallen off sharply after 2016.
EXTERNAL LINK 




Eric Gus

Posts 477
03 Jul 2019 08:03


Renee Cousins wrote:

 
eric gus wrote:

 
Renee Cousins wrote:

      MiSTer development is already fading, but I don't believe Terasic will be going anywhere any time soon.
   

   
    I dont know if its fading.. seems to have some degree of momentum these days .. I think the bulk of the old Mist cores have been migrated so if you are comparing activity to those days when new cores were showing up in bunches every day .. then ok, sure .. but if you look at the near graveyard MIST development is to MiSTer .. its vastly way more active .. (even with the recent uptick in a few one offs in the MiST universe). What I see going on now with MiSTer is many cores are now getting reworked, more features added, getting expanded, the core of the MiSTer itself is getting more features at a good clip (like software midi synth/TCPSER etc..)
   
 

  Specifically with regards to MiniMig-AGA, development has fallen off sharply after 2016.
  EXTERNAL LINK   
 
 
 

 
  Ah... Well as I follow the MiSTer/Mist daily, I suspect with that situation is they ran out of things to add.. I know there is some talk around improving the CPU part of the core, but I dont think they have any new "stuff" they want to add.. so I wouldn't take that as an indication of the platform "fading" so much as one core author (Namely Sorgelig as of late and also the primary creator of the MiSTer) has been working on other parts of mister and it seems (at least the way I read the tea leaves) he feels minimig is mostly complete .. or as complete as it needs to be for now (he tends to not add new stuff to a given core unless you can really state a good logical reason eg the recent 1531 Mouse support in the c64 core as an example).. hence nothing really new added aside from the odd bug fixes .. I think it would be more appropriate to call it "mature".. Also one core does not make an entire platform.  here is the current discussion about the minimig core over on the atari-forums (ironically enough) where the most chatter about core development/mister happens .. I wouldn't go by github contributes to judge activity .. not everything worked on eventually works it way to a github commit.. EXTERNAL LINK


Markus B

Posts 209
30 May 2020 10:04


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Yes, in theory yes.
 
Porting the core will take significant time and effort.
If people pay us this time, then we can talk about this.

How much fund would be needed?

There are some advantages that come with the DE10:

- thousands already sold and in use
- Terasic confirmed availability until at least the end of 2023
- many other cores already available and users would have a single system only


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
30 May 2020 10:19


Markus B wrote:

There are some advantages that come with the DE10:

What I not like about engineering cards like DE10 is
that most of them are only for B2B and are illegal in Europe.


Markus B

Posts 209
30 May 2020 10:26


Mouser seems to be happy to sell them in Europe to end customers.
What is illegal about it?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
30 May 2020 10:31


Markus B wrote:

  Mouser seems to be happy to sell them in Europe to end customers.
  What is illegal about it?
 

Markus call Mouser and discuss this with them.
 
But don't be a snitch who does discuss this here.
If you speak about these sales of mouser here in open, tomorrow someone might report them - and then the boards are history and your dealer stops this.
Lets not do this.


Ian Parsons

Posts 230
30 May 2020 11:56


While MiST started as a project building on what Minimig had done to create an Atari ST core based system the Amiga core seemed to be more popular and then other retro cores were ported/created too. MiSTer thanks to the use of the cheap dev board used has become the go to system for multi-platform FPGA retro recreations.

I don't think a port of the Apollo core to MiSTer would be a good idea as there are so many other cores already for it and it's a very retro games oriented community. Having said that it would at least put a standalone "Vampire" in my price range.

posts 34page  1 2