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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

A500 Vampire

David Turner

Posts 1
23 Oct 2016 16:43


Hello

Firstly I would like to say what you guys are doing with your accelerator boards is amazing, and it far exceeds anything you could imagine with the old 68k accelerator boards.

My question is, I have noticed that you are selling the A500 boards on ebay, would this be the case in the long run to bid for them, or at some point would there be a fixed price. Thanks.

 


Roger Shimada

Posts 30
23 Oct 2016 18:07


I'm not on the team, but since you're probably new here....

TL;DR I'm confident that eventually the A500 Vampire will have a fixed price.

The demand for the A600 Vampire has been overwhelming. Majsta was  expecting to maybe sell 100, but apparently over 500 have been produced since July. See EXTERNAL LINK

This has caused a years long hobby project to suddenly become a business.

If you check the "Running ATARI On 68080" thread, Gunnar wrote:
"So our focus today is getting Apollo-Accelerator production to a level where we can produce 200+ cards per month."

Since the A500 was the single most popular Amiga, the A500 Vampire will require a suitable amount of production.

As Majsta states in the eBay Description:
"Mass production isn't planned yet and from time to time accelerators will be offered on eBay to raise funds for future projects."

The A1200 expansion connector is out of production. Producing the first one will cost thousands in tooling.


Roman S.

Posts 149
23 Oct 2016 20:29


If 'only thousands' (not tens of thousands) then, given the most likely demand, this is not that much :)


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
23 Oct 2016 20:34


I really don't want to say ANYTHING negative about this project, but have to say that; I think that mass producing accelerators was a mistake. I think that they should have made a batch of 50 solely for the reason of PROVING that it was workable and for bug fixing, then proceed to making a STANDALONE motherboard.

The standalone (that they have chosen to make) will be MUCH MUCH faster, and be able to "be" a combination of over 10 different computers and/or video game consoles at every boot-up!!!!

Someone must eventually be able to get this noticed by someone with deep pockets that is willing to finance a big production run to DRASTICALLY lower the cost of each unit.

As well, it just doesn't matter what others are doing, for instance in particular, Raspberry Pi. You know that, a 1 Gigabyte Raspberry Pi uses

EXTERNAL LINK 
by Yoda007 » Sat Dec 21, 2013 7:10 pm
I have a question about the memory usage, but instead of opening a new thread I will ask it here:

My Pi has 73800 (aprox. 72 MB) free after it is booted up with 240/16 split (256 MB model B). After i run the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Pi has 26660 (aprox. 25 MB) free.

I think that if other applications would need the 40 MB of memory the apt-get has reserved that memory would be freed and available. Is that correct or does the apt-get have a memory leak (probably not :P)?

P.S. I ran apt-get clean command afterwards and I got 60116 (approx 59MB) free. Do I need to call the clean command to get the memory back or would the memory be freed as needed ?


well, it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how much RAM the OS's of Raspberry Pis use as most of the OS in question, still resides on the SD card!!!!....

The main point is that AMIGA OS is at MAXIMUM about 4 Megabytes in size (AOS3.9), and that's ALL of it, including the superfluous stuff.

Why is this relevant?

This computer being made now will make waves across the ENTIRE COMPUTING INDUSTRY!

SMALL OS, "INSTANT-ON", and INFINITELY USER CONTROLLABLE!

It will be the ONLY personal computer for sale in the market!


Amiga 4Life

Posts 101
23 Oct 2016 21:33


This card will succeed in an untapped market. Cpu & Rtg combo board inside the Amiga 500...
Phase 5 & Gvp, two companies had all the know-how & resources needed to pull this off but
  didn't, Why...??  C= and MicroSystems never made an accelerator for the a500.

The more users the Apollo/Vampire can get the better.cpu accelerator,standalone,emulation,
whatever... More is better...


Tango One

Posts 102
23 Oct 2016 21:34


Thierry Atheist wrote:

  The standalone (that they have chosen to make) will be MUCH MUCH faster, and be able to "be" a combination of over 10 different computers and/or video game consoles at every boot-up!!!!

Yes standalone is the way to go.


Roman S.

Posts 149
23 Oct 2016 21:39


They already went standalone - project was called Natami and somehow it didn't work. As for the competition, we have FPGA Arcade, which in reality hardly anyone was able to buy, and MIST - which is slower than my A1200 with 030 40 MHz, compatibility is not too good, and the development basically stopped.
   
By releasing the accelerator first, they could focus on just one component: the CPU. It gets bugfixed, optimized, etc. They have hundreds of betatesters, soon they will have thousands, if they release Vampire for Atari ST they will get a lot of more, testing completely different software. For now they don't have to worry about their AGA implementation, their Paula implementation, etc. Yes, they have added RTG, SD card slot, now IDE is coming - but they don't have to hurry, even serious bugs in these subsystems won't be showstoppers.
   
[troll mode]
4 MB for the OS? What an oversized piece of crap, GEOS for the C64 could fit on one 170 KB floppy!
[/troll mode]
   


Amiga 4Life

Posts 101
23 Oct 2016 21:46


and MiniMig was good but it wasn't a hit....


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
23 Oct 2016 21:56


Roman S. wrote:

[troll mode]
4 MB for the OS? What an oversized piece of crap, GEOS for the C64 could fit on one 170 KB floppy!
[/troll mode]

LOL!

"Ya got me, pardner..."
EXTERNAL LINK 


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
23 Oct 2016 22:05


My major fear of the way it is being done now (all, water under the bridge, at this point) is that there are 2+ tiers of models with differing capabilities/performance levels... as well as "I've already got this, do I also need another?" dividing the audience/market place.

Mind you, if the standalone, could drop in price (assuming mass production) to about $250 US, I think that every person that has bought one until today, WOULD BUY THAT ONE as well! (Many would buy 2 or more.)

P.S. For those that doubt my, at times, seemingly preposterous claims,... go look at posts on AmigaWorld.Net and Amiga.Org (and other websites), and check for people that are posting (say, in the last 6 months) that have 200 or less posts (and sometimes even under 50) and have 3, 5, 10 even 12 year old account origin dates!!!!

The potential market is MUCH BIGGER than anyone here (except for ME) thinks!!!!


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
23 Oct 2016 22:56


Make of this what you will, but about 20 minutes ago, I went and grabbed the 50 latest topics titles on Amiga.Org and;

Out of 50
11 were Amiga items for sale
4 were wanting to buy Amiga items
2 were about new products
1 was about a new AMIGA store!!!!

That's 36% of the conversations going on there!

I think that the RIGHT product appears, and things will blossom!

P.S. And one topic about the Vampire 2 in an Atari ST.


Alan Haynes

Posts 140
25 Oct 2016 04:58


Thierry Atheist wrote:

  My major fear of the way it is being done now (all, water under the bridge, at this point) is that there are 2+ tiers of models with differing capabilities/performance levels... as well as "I've already got this, do I also need another?" dividing the audience/market place.
 
  Mind you, if the standalone, could drop in price (assuming mass production) to about $250 US, I think that every person that has bought one until today, WOULD BUY THAT ONE as well! (Many would buy 2 or more.)
 
  P.S. For those that doubt my, at times, seemingly preposterous claims,... go look at posts on AmigaWorld.Net and Amiga.Org (and other websites), and check for people that are posting (say, in the last 6 months) that have 200 or less posts (and sometimes even under 50) and have 3, 5, 10 even 12 year old account origin dates!!!!
 
  The potential market is MUCH BIGGER than anyone here (except for ME) thinks!!!!
 

 
  I have to admit Thierry that I used to think that you were a little off track. However after reading about Majsta's 500 orders from what He originally thought would be 100 I am right behind you. To be really truthful I think it is even possible now that even you may have underestimated the demand.
  Let me explain. I just went searching for sales figures and the best lot I can come up with so far is from Germany.
  From a post in Amiga.org
  Amiga CD32 25.000
  Amiga CDTV 25.800
  Amiga 500 1.081.000
  Amiga 500+ 79.500
  Amiga 600 193.000
  Amiga 1000 27.500
  Amiga 1200 95.500
  Amiga 2000 124.500
  Amiga 3000 8.300
  Amiga 4000/030 7.500
  Amiga 4000/040 3.800
  All we need to do is use these figures and see that just in Germany 193,000 a600's were sold whereas more than 1,250,000 of a500, a500+ and a2000's were sold. That is roughly 6 times the number of a600's.
  What does this mean for Vampire v2 A500 which will fit in a500, a500+ and a2000. It means that the orders for the Vampire V2 a500 could be as high as 3000 units. It must be realised here that these figures are only based on 1 country but the proportions are probably similar around the world except for in North America which hardly sold any a600's but probably sold more a2000's than anywhere else. I would expect that the take up un North America could bump the possible 3000 units by another 1000 and that could still be under stated.
  All of this poses some real problems for the Vampire team and everyone that is hoping to get just one of these cards.
  1: We do not want the boys to pack up their marbles and go home at such a crucial stage of the Amiga's resurrection.
  2: Everyone has to be patient and let the team work their way through this wonderful challenge. Make suggestions but please do not be demanding as they already have a plan but possibly did not foresee the wonderful consequences of opening Pandora's box. Offering a far more powerful accellerator that has ever been offered before to Amigan's and it looks like early Mac users and now Atari users want to jump on board this ever growing bus to who knows where.
  3:  I know nothing about mass production but it seems to me that Team Vampire must now find some way to speed up the production process in a way that keeps prices within the grasp of the majority but also keeps the supply moving at a pace that will please the majority.
 
  I am sure this is only a tiny sample of the Team's challenges that they are facing but if we are patient we will be rewarded.
  regards,
  Alan Haynes from Queensland, Australia
 


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
25 Oct 2016 07:29


Hi Alan Haynes,

Great to hear from you!!!

Totally agree with you.

You know what intrigues me as a peculiar market possibility?

While a tiny market, I wonder what the NeXT Cube was all about? In particular what got me highly curious about it was the "Display Postscript" video image system. From what I understand about Postscript, it is mathematical equations generating an image, therefore resolution scales up and down, even capable of generating through to 8K screens!!!!




Alan Haynes

Posts 140
25 Oct 2016 10:41


Thierry Atheist wrote:

You know what intrigues me as a peculiar market possibility?
 
  While a tiny market, I wonder what the NeXT Cube was all about? In particular what got me highly curious about it was the "Display Postscript" video image system. From what I understand about Postscript, it is mathematical equations generating an image, therefore resolution scales up and down, even capable of generating through to 8K screens!!!!
 
 

Well I don't know anything about that. I thought Postcript was to do with printing but it sounds interesting. I guess it depends on how difficult it would be to implement.

Cheers from Oz




Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
29 Oct 2016 21:22


Thierry Atheist wrote:
P.S. For those that doubt my, at times, seemingly preposterous claims,... go look at posts on AmigaWorld.Net and Amiga.Org (and other websites), and check for people that are posting (say, in the last 6 months) that have 200 or less posts (and sometimes even under 50) and have 3, 5, 10 even 12 year old account origin dates!!!!

The potential market is MUCH BIGGER than anyone here (except for ME) thinks!!!!

EXTERNAL LINK


Alasdair Simpson

Posts 2
30 Oct 2016 20:31


If the market for the 500 version of the Vampire goes the same as the 600 did, then it can only be good news indeed.

My only concern is where or how to route the outputs to. The A500 cases are getting so very brittle to drill/cut or modify now. I had my A600 RF modulator removed to make way for the DIGITAL-VIDEO, but I can't do that on a 500.

Ideally I'd like to see the powers that be behind the Vampire work with those who are creating the new Amiga Cases, as this could be one hell of a symbiotic relationship. So that if new A500 cases were ever produced, the necessary connections such as DIGITAL-VIDEO etc could be integrated into the build design of a new case.




Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
02 Nov 2016 12:22


EXTERNAL LINK


Brian Robotham

Posts 52
02 Nov 2016 18:27


The A500 has a great spot for the hdmi to exit at the back under the floppy drive, i did a little mod that anyone could do with a little patience, i will post pics later

posts 18