 Documentation about the Vampire hardware |
| A Viable Amiga Vampire 2 Ecosystem | |
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Mo Retro
Posts 241
22 Nov 2016 11:13
| Just my 2 cents of thoughts on the subject :)
As we are now getting more & more Vampire 2's out in the wild now and even more next year, we should think about a viable ecosystem for it.What could be achieved with such renewed Amiga Vampire2 ecosystem? 1) First of all we need Development tools:
a) As not everyone is a low level assembler programmer, it's necessary that the benefits of the Vampire2/Apollo combo should be available for high level programming languages like C, Pascal & so on.
b) The AMMX should be available also in a form of library or include or whatever for C, Pascal & so on.
c) The new possibilities of the SAGA chipset accessible via C, Pascal & so on.
d) The SD Card idem ditto This is a must and it would speed up development for the Vampire2 Ecosystem tremendously! 2)Gaming:
a) There is a lot of offering from the past of OCS/ECS & AGA games.
b) We could use some new developments to keep the momentum going for ex in the 3D section.
Philippe Flype showed us all what's possible with only a fraction of the Vampire 2 power with his Demo. And that's only a tip of the iceberg :)
3) Productivity Applications:
a) There is big offering of legacy productivity applications that can be used already.
b) If it's possible they can be patched or replaced by better offerings.
c) New Developments
i) Modern Office applications like word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software. handling of PDF documents.
ii) Graphic software to keep on par with the PC offerings or better.
iii) Internet: need up to date browsers It's not necessary to re-invent the wheel, much can be achieved from open source projects or source made available from legacy Amiga software. My list is not limitative, please feel free to add or modify it. I hope that we as a community will rise together with our Re-Vamped Amiga from the ashes like the Phoenix :)
If Phoenix is the name of the Vampire 2 Standalone board, that would be a very applicable, appropriate, suitable for it :-D
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Thierry Atheist
Posts 644
22 Nov 2016 12:55
| Mo Retro wrote:
| 3) Productivity Applications:
c) New Developments
i) .... . handling of PDF documents.
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I hope that some of the new CPU capability, like maybe AMMX, can speed up opening PDFs. Of course, someone is needed who is willing to write the code.I think I read that it can help decode jpegs faster to display them. Since the video output is 1920*1080, we'll need as much as possible running at optimum speeds.
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Samuel Crow
Posts 424
22 Nov 2016 14:06
| Mo Retro wrote:
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1) First of all we need Development tools:
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Agreed.
Mo Retro wrote:
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a) As not everyone is a low level assembler programmer, it's necessary that the benefits of the Vampire2/Apollo combo should be available for high level programming languages like C, Pascal & so on.
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Let's walk before we run. There are still bugs to be fixed even in the assemblers before they will work reliably as a backend to a high-level compiler.
Mo Retro wrote:
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b) The AMMX should be available also in a form of library or include or whatever for C, Pascal & so on.
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The calling overhead of such a library would kill the performance. Some high-end compiler frameworks like GCC 6.x and LLVM support the use of vector units internally though. Good luck fitting them in 128 megs of RAM though. It'll have to use cross-development from a bigger system.
Mo Retro wrote:
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c) The new possibilities of the SAGA chipset accessible via C, Pascal & so on.
d) The SD Card idem ditto
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Using the Picasso 96 drivers makes all of that possible for the graphics, though I'd suggest sticking to the CyberGFX 3 headers so that it may work in AROS as well in the future, if necessary. Sound add-ons should be backward compatible to the AHI APIs even if current AHI sources written in C generate yucky code.
Mo Retro wrote:
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This is a must and it would speed up development for the Vampire2 Ecosystem tremendously!
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Tell us what your favorite high-level language is and maybe we can give you some tips and suggestions that will allow you to help us! We can't do everything ourselves, after all.
Mo Retro wrote:
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2)Gaming:
a) There is a lot of offering from the past of OCS/ECS & AGA games.
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Agreed.
Mo Retro wrote:
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b) We could use some new developments to keep the momentum going for ex in the 3D section.
Philippe Flype showed us all what's possible with only a fraction of the Vampire 2 power with his Demo. And that's only a tip of the iceberg :)
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If you're fluent in C and want to look at the source code to StormMesa2010, that will benefit most from a floating point vector unit. It won't be faster without floating-point support though.
Mo Retro wrote:
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3) Productivity Applications:
a) There is big offering of legacy productivity applications that can be used already.
b) If it's possible they can be patched or replaced by better offerings.
c) New Developments
i) Modern Office applications like word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software. handling of PDF documents.
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This will take time. Tim "Terminills" Dieter on the AROS platform has acquired the rights to one of the Classic Amiga office suites and has hired one of the AROS development team to bring it up-to-date. It will be quite a while until the whole suite is ready and that's just for x86 AROS alone. Once it's ready getting it to work on AROS 68k shouldn't be so difficult though.
Mo Retro wrote:
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ii) Graphic software to keep on par with the PC offerings or better.
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Dude! We don't own Adobe! Art Department Professional is being updated by A-Eon but knowing Trevor Dickinson, he'll probably backport the features from the new OS4 version back to OS3 somehow.
Mo Retro wrote:
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iii) Internet: need up to date browsers
It's not necessary to re-invent the wheel, much can be achieved from open source projects or source made available from legacy Amiga software.
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NetSurf will fit in 32-megs so it might help. It's only HTML4 though. Getting HTML5 to work is so much different you'd almost be better off starting over from scratch.
Mo Retro wrote:
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My list is not limitative, please feel free to add or modify it.
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I disagree. Reduce your expectations for the short-term. There are things being worked on that will take years to implement. The code will not write itself and we need all hands on board. Where do you fit into the solution? Identifying the problems is not hard. Finding the manpower to put it into place is.
Mo Retro wrote:
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I hope that we as a community will rise together with our Re-Vamped Amiga from the ashes like the Phoenix :)
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There have been so many other revamped "AmigaOne" machines and PPC Macs refitted with MorphOS, it's going to be hard to attract all the coders together so everyone should do what they can. Don't just act like you're going to sit back and watch. Get involved and start coding or drawing icons or anything you think will be useful. We can help point you in the right direction for tools and compilers and such and warn you of pitfalls but don't expect the existing team to do anything more than hardware and the device drivers to access it. Without 3rd party coders we're just as sunk as before only running old code faster.
Mo Retro wrote:
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If Phoenix is the name of the Vampire 2 Standalone board, that would be a very applicable, appropriate, suitable for it :-D
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I'm glad somebody thinks so. Buy one and start coding so your dreams can take wing. If all we do is sit in our ashes (Did I just say that?) we're not going to go far.
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OneSTone O2o
Posts 159
22 Nov 2016 17:18
| Office Suite: Why not porting an old version of OpenOffice which would be happy with the performance of of a 100 Mhz CPU? (and hoping on the ASIC one day)
Graphics: Old version of GIMP which is not demanding too much CPU performance?There might be a lot of open source linux software which could be ported to Amiga OS?
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Samuel Crow
Posts 424
22 Nov 2016 18:29
| oneSTone o2o wrote:
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Office Suite: Why not porting an old version of OpenOffice which would be happy with the performance of of a 100 Mhz CPU? (and hoping on the ASIC one day)
Graphics: Old version of GIMP which is not demanding too much CPU performance?
There might be a lot of open source linux software which could be ported to Amiga OS?
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Open/Libre Office software is difficult to port to AmigaOS as is GIMP or any other POSIX source code because AmigaOS is implemented entirely differently than Linux. To be sure, it's not the CPU that is the limitation it is the MMU, shared library implementation and GUI libraries. It would be easier to port Linux to the Amiga or run NetBSD on some Amiga with a traditional MMU. The MMU used by the Apollo SAGA core works a lot differently.
Also, don't get hung up on the clock speed just because we run at about 100 MHz. Current Gold2 prototype cores also run at the efficiency of a Core2 Solo per clock cycle so we are many times faster than an old Pentium.
One final thing about POSIX and Linux software: Even an OS like Haiku which is largely POSIX compliant, many Linux ports are hard fought even then because the event sniffer on their GUI runs in a different thread than the main executable. Just because something works well on Linux doesn't make it portable code.
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OneSTone O2o
Posts 159
22 Nov 2016 20:05
| So you have another argument to implement 68K PMMU into your MCU. :) ATARIans also needs that for MiNT. Speed of Apollo is amazing, right. But even on a Pentium 4m laptop (my Thinkpad A31m which I am using for a lot of things regarding transporting datas between modern PC world / Internet on the one side and Amiga / Atari / MS-DOS-PC on the other side) current version of Libre Office feels like slow motion. I don't think that Apollo currently can beat the Pentium 4m (1.4 Ghz), even if that is the bad Netburst design.
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Roman S.
Posts 149
22 Nov 2016 20:51
| Mo Retro wrote:
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There is big offering of legacy productivity applications that can be used already
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Have fun exchanging data with MS Office or LibreOffice. Are all the Y2K bugs already fixed? Mo Retro wrote:
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If it's possible they can be patched or replaced by better offerings.
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Mo Retro wrote:
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Modern Office applications like word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software. handling of PDF documents.
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With the current Amiga community manpower? Better PDF handling is probably possible, remaining ones... well. Mo Retro wrote:
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Graphic software to keep on par with the PC offerings or better.
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Yea, let's open and process this 24 Mpix RAW file on a 128 MB RAM machine! And who actually needs these fancy AMD/nVidia GPU shaders? Mo Retro wrote:
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Internet: need up to date browsers
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On a machine that is not powerful enough to play anything more then MPEG1 video the current JavaScript-loaded pages will just fly :) Be realistic. Vampire is probably going to be THE ultimate card/board for playing with m68k AmigaOS and legacy apps/games - but I wouldn't expect much more.
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Kolbjørn Barmen
(Needs Verification)
Posts 219/ 2
22 Nov 2016 22:00
| At this point in time, I am more interested in "damn fast AGA and more chipram" than RTG, as all creativity software I find worth while to use on Amiga hardware, would be native software that does not work well with RTG in the first place. And Internet? When the only protocol fairly well supported on Amiga is FTP over IPv4, then there isn't much use for that either, except for file transfers on LAN.
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Johannes Schäfer
Posts 47
23 Nov 2016 00:55
| Sorry for getting so long:
1) First of all we need Development tools:
Yes.
I tried to learn C with the Amiga some months ago, but finally gave up, because the tutorials started with programming but I did not found the C system and how to install it in my Amiga. Maybe starting assembler but dont know how and what. I have to startup from the scratch.
We also need documentation and programming examples for the SAGA chipset.
Today you can broadcast tutorials with Youtube and other channels.2)Gaming:
a) There is a lot of offering from the past of OCS/ECS & AGA games.
Yes.
With DIGITAL-VIDEO coming, it would be nice if there could be an enhanced mode, which improves the display an TFT, like increasing resolution and adding Anti Aliasing. b) We could use some new developments to keep the momentum going for ex in the 3D section. Disagree, if you need 3D go for a PC or PSX4. Vampire and SAGA cannot compete today. Instead go for a perfect and supersmooth 2D section. There is a big market for a computer/console combination for kids, if you ask me
It will be hard enough to reach the power to get close to the PC/Console Market ~ 1999. That would mean PSX1, Dreamcast and PC Games like Halflife 1. I am sure the combined power of 68080+SAGA will reach this goal.
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We need games with 3D input devices like a joystick. Mouse is 2D input device and therefore okay. But a touchpad is a 1D input device, making our kids totally idiots. (your hands are 3D input devices connected to your brain) 3) Productivity Applications:
Making the core as compatible as possible to run the old software. The rest is not business of the Apollo Team (for now)
iii) Internet: need up to date browsers
Keeping up to date with the latest HTML standard seems to be an chase the Amiga can´t win.
This is a special problem. I don´t why today there must be a scripting language for websites. Maybe there could be a alternative. Something like processing website on special supercomputers and sending/streaming the result to the enduser.
Nvidia is offering something similar with Nvidia shield, streaming HighEnd Games rendered on their supercomputers.
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Samuel Crow
Posts 424
23 Nov 2016 04:25
| oneSTone o2o wrote:
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So you have another argument to implement 68K PMMU into your MCU. :) ATARIans also needs that for MiNT.
Speed of Apollo is amazing, right. But even on a Pentium 4m laptop (my Thinkpad A31m which I am using for a lot of things regarding transporting datas between modern PC world / Internet on the one side and Amiga / Atari / MS-DOS-PC on the other side) current version of Libre Office feels like slow motion. I don't think that Apollo currently can beat the Pentium 4m (1.4 Ghz), even if that is the bad Netburst design.
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AmigaOS 4 has an alternate shared object format to allow plugins to work. It has both ports of GIMP and LibreOffice. They were hard-fought and LibreOffice won't come free. There is zero chance that either of them will be ported back to AmigaOS 3 with or without an MMU. The AmigaOS4 version requires a PowerPC which comes standard with an MMU and clocks at about 800 MHz. If you want a cheap Linux box, buy a Raspbery Pi.
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Wawa T
Posts 695
23 Nov 2016 06:10
| | It has both ports of GIMP and LibreOffice |
gimp only under linux emulation, namely cygnix, and almost none mentions to use it ever, except to complain about speed. libre office is been told to be in an alpha stage, but if anyone actually has seen it work, i dont know. this is not a good kind of software candidate for amiga or amiga like systems, i fear. lets stay realistic.
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Roman S.
Posts 149
23 Nov 2016 07:22
| Johannes Schäfer wrote:
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I did not found the C system and how to install it in my Amiga. |
Dice C: EXTERNAL LINK EXTERNAL LINK
VBCC: EXTERNAL LINK
You will also need AmigaOS headers EXTERNAL LINK Johannes Schäfer wrote:
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With DIGITAL-VIDEO coming, it would be nice if there could be an enhanced mode, which improves the display an TFT, like increasing resolution and adding Anti Aliasing.
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Increasing the resolution is only possible with games using 3D accelerator. With 99,9% of Amiga games you can only do upscaling. Anything more would require altering the game itself and providing own assets. In fact, something like this was already done few times - see Eye of the Beholder for AGA, or the refreshed Giana Sisters.
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John Heritage
Posts 111
23 Nov 2016 19:35
| What would it take to get Apollo running as a dual core / two-thread CPU in AmigaOS? . Now is the time to figure that out to help encourage development in the future.. Even if it's just for certain applications.
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Mo Retro
Posts 241
23 Nov 2016 19:59
| Wow I think I must have been fallen in a Lions Liar :)
I was expecting some reaction, but not like this.
I must thank you Samuel for your comprehensive feedback. :)
Some explaining is always useful, so let me start with clarifying the purpose of my post:
1) I am very well aware that the Apollo/Vampire 2 Team has no spare time left to deal with additional projects or goals.
2) My post was not a complaint addressed to the Apollo / Vampire 2 Team, because that would be the last thing I would do. ;) I'm more an enthusiastic fan of the Apollo / Vampire 2 Team and I stand up in favour of them. :D
3) My call was to the Amiga community, to unite around this new momentum of interest and not a poke to the Apollo Team. ;) Except for the aid on programming tools which is a must.
4) I wanted to start a constructive discussion about the subject in any way possible if that can add to resurrection of our beloved Amiga.
5) I was brainstorming alone on what was needed to have again a viable Amiga & Vampire ecosystem. I wanted to share my thoughts with the community.
6) It's clear that we must tap talent & resources from the Amiga community in a broader sense. There is a Hardcore of Amiga enthusiasts that have never left the Amiga. These guys know the Amiga best. As more and more people are getting back to the Amiga, we can use this in positive way to bring them together. So my call was also to this new group of enthusiasts to get involved and not only be a consumer or just a bystander.
7) My point was to start a open minded discussion. It was also an anwer to fellow forum member Alan Haynes in another thread EXTERNAL LINK I didn't want to hijack that thread, that's why i posted my thoughts in this new thread.
But it seems that I stumbled in pit of lions :)
But remember that every negative looking point has also a positive side, just look for it :)
8)My post was not meant as the bible of an Amiga ecosystem but merely a warm call to all stakeholders that means users, developers, artists, etc. who are committed to this community.
9) As for graphical tools I was not pointing at the heavy stuff, that eats tons of memory. But with a minimum of 128MB to start with.
The A1200 V2 & standalone V2 are supposed to have more memory. This was discussed here in the forum!
10) If the Vampire 2 standalone reaches 1GHz or more, if implemented in ASIC, then this would be fastest Real Amiga ever. Fast enough to bring a new application expercience to the Classic Amiga!
11) Samuel Crow wrote:
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Mo Retro wrote:
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b) We could use some new developments to keep the momentum going for ex in the 3D section.
Philippe Flype showed us all what's possible with only a fraction of the Vampire 2 power with his Demo. And that's only a tip of the iceberg :)
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If you're fluent in C and want to look at the source code to StormMesa2010, that will benefit most from a floating point vector unit. It won't be faster without floating-point support though.
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When i said 3D i was pointing at games à la Doom & Quake. Sorry for the confusion :)
12) Samuel Crow wrote:
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Mo Retro wrote:
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This is a must and it would speed up development for the Vampire2 Ecosystem tremendously!
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Tell us what your favorite high-level language is and maybe we can give you some tips and suggestions that will allow you to help us! We can't do everything ourselves, after all.
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I myself I'm not an Amiga system programmer, but I have programmed in C and Pascal/Delphi and FreePascal / Lazarus, but i have no experience in programming on the Amiga.
In my spare I'm reading the Technical Manuals to get an idea of the Amiga hardware & Software architecture.
I just started some testing of FreePascal which is a cross platform development system. FreePascal is an open source alternative to Object Pascal & Delphi that's available on a lot of platforms. Recently ALB42 & Chain-Q updated the Amiga 68K fork.
ALB42 made a Linux based FreePascal Virtual system available. That system can be configured to compile for Amiga OS 3.X, OS4 or AROS.
EXTERNAL LINK This Virtual System is also available via Aminet.
EXTERNAL LINK The drawback momentarily is that FreePascal for classic Amiga, links the runtime library statically . So even a Hello World program is a couple of Megabytes. ALB42 told me that it's on his to do list, but you know how scarce spare time is ;). However this is not a big problem for classic machines equipped with more than the standard ram.
If FreePascal could target the Apollo 68080 then this would boost the performance of the compiled programs. ALB42 and Chain-Q can be contacted for that. Chain-Q is also a member of this forum.
13) Samuel Crow wrote:
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Mo Retro wrote:
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I hope that we as a community will rise together with our Re-Vamped Amiga from the ashes like the Phoenix :)
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There have been so many other revamped "AmigaOne" machines and PPC Macs refitted with MorphOS, it's going to be hard to attract all the coders together so everyone should do what they can. Don't just act like you're going to sit back and watch. Get involved and start coding or drawing icons or anything you think will be useful. We can help point you in the right direction for tools and compilers and such and warn you of pitfalls but don't expect the existing team to do anything more than hardware and the device drivers to access it. Without 3rd party coders we're just as sunk as before only running old code faster.
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That said, I want to lent a hand to the community in every which way possible to help our Amiga rise from the ashes :D
As my Amiga knowledge is still low, but I'm slowly but steadily evolving and I want to help in for example translating, documenting, proofreading, testing or any other way possible.
All the best,
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Samuel Crow
Posts 424
24 Nov 2016 17:15
| Thanks for your reply, Mo Retro. As for point 11, StormMesa 2010 is a software implementation of an old version of OpenGL so it would bring QuakeGL and it's derivatives like Quake2 into range with only one library updated. As for point 12, if you want an easy to learn but lightweight object oriented language for AmigaOS 2 or 3, I would suggest AmigaE. It's free on the Aminet and under an open source license. It has its own directory on Aminet in /dev/amigae directory. Since the Vampire 500 I was using malfunctioned, I am down to using a nearly stock A1200 and the compiler runs happily in 2 megs of Chip RAM, even though AmigaOS eats up half of the available RAM.
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Mo Retro
Posts 241
04 Dec 2016 21:37
| Thanks for the 2 tips Samuel :D
I'll will look into AmigaE as soon as this busy end of year period is over.:)
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