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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Should I Buy a Vampire for SW Dev Or Keep WinUAE ?

Markus Horbach

Posts 35
05 Aug 2017 05:08


first of all, i love the hard work everybody is doing with Apollo / Vampire to improve the Amiga Hardware. For nostalgic reasons, I use WinUAE to replay some classic Amiga games and more important, to run Demos and Cracktros for Amiga 500 / 1200.  I do not own a classic Amiga, so I purcased a copy of Cloanto Amiga Forever to get the AMIGA ROMs and Workbench disks for WinUAE and stay legal. Its not a big investment. But as a hardware/software developer, i am not completely satisfied with my situation. Just playing classic games and watching Demos make me just a consumer of software, but the spirit of the homecomputer age is to be able to create something by yourself.
After some use of google, I understood that a lot of newly created software for classic amigas is created by cross develompment on a PC. I am familiar with this in the embedded world, but a Amiga is a fully equipped computer, so a native development of software is possible. For example, the StormC C compiler exists for classic workbench software development. Gunnar mentioned once, assembler programming is the key to take advantage of the Apollo Core extensions. This leads me to my question, were is a Macro Assembler available to create applications for the workbench on a Apollo/Vampire Amiga system ? And of course a up-to-date documentation/tutorial of the Workbench programming environment. If a C compiler for Apollo Core exists, this would my preffered starting point.
For myself, i decided to buy only new Amiga hardware, if i can use the hardware in a creative way and not to consume classic games only.  How to start programming for the Apollo/Vampire, whats your suggestion when you are new to the Amiga ?

Best regards,
Markus.

PS: I miss a forum tab Software development / OS3.x extensions for  Apollo/Vampire


Steve Ferrell

Posts 424
05 Aug 2017 07:11


Why don't you give this a shot?  Worked great for me the last time I was doing any Amiga development.

EXTERNAL LINK


Markus Horbach

Posts 35
05 Aug 2017 13:31


I had a look to it but it seems to be a little bit too old to know about the needs of an 68080 Vampire. I hope its easy enough to create a "Hello World" as a first step with Windows for cross compilation to OS3.x

Best regards,
Markus.


Marlon Beijer

Posts 182
05 Aug 2017 13:33


If you prefer to code in a more modern fashion with C/C++, there's a GCC v6 cross compiler for Windows, Mac and Linux:
  EXTERNAL LINK 
 
If you prefer to develop on the Amiga, vasm/vbcc is still maintained today and supports 68080:
  EXTERNAL LINK


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
05 Aug 2017 16:06


Markus Horbach wrote:
For myself, i decided to buy only new Amiga hardware, if i can use the hardware in a creative way and not to consume classic games only.  How to start programming for the Apollo/Vampire, whats your suggestion when you are new to the Amiga ?

Best regards,
Markus.


Hi Markus,

Well, WinUAE doesn't emulate a Vampire, any Vampire....
I would say that answers the question.

I mean, no matter how good a coder you are, you won't see the results of your software, right? And you won't be able to hear it either.

The Vampire really elevates what AMIGA can do to nearly today's standards. Sure, it's not 7.1 audio, or full 1080p playback with no frames dropped. And there simply is NO WAY to keep up with the moving target that HTML is.... But it is a good SOLID computer that is capable of database management, DTP, photo editing and many mundane tasks as well.

There are plenty of top notch games that don't need 3 GHz CPUs that can be big hits. I don't see why something like Plants Vs. Zombies can't be done on a Vampire. That was an EXCELLENT game.

Lots of new utilities could be coded in 64 bit.

There's so much goodness new to AMIGA to explore, but you won't be able to do it without owning a Vampire.

Besides, the FPGA code will be changing a few more times. WinUAE will never keep up with what Vampire is doing, if it tried to.


Markus Horbach

Posts 35
05 Aug 2017 17:09


Multimedia playback will always include pesky DRM and licensing Codecs with the need of powerful hardware.
Not my goal to create software for. Even not to consume with an Amiga. Cool if it works, but not important for me if it is absent.

Audio and Video capabilities for 2D Shoot-them-ups and jump-and-runs and some demo coding is what i search for. To start today with coding for Amiga OS3.x WinUAE is enough. After getting some experience, I can switch to a vampire board if available. I am the last one in a long queue if I want to buy a Vampire Board today. I only want to know what is the recommended path to create software for vampirised Amigas 2017.

Best regards,
Markus.


Steve Ferrell

Posts 424
06 Aug 2017 00:34


Markus Horbach wrote:

            I had a look to it but it seems to be a little bit too old to know about the needs of an 68080 Vampire. I hope its easy enough to create a "Hello World" as a first step with Windows for cross compilation to OS3.x
           
            Best regards,
            Markus.
           

           
           
What needs are you referring to?  And Thierry is correct.  WinUAE doesn't emulate a Vampire so why are you discounting developer apps simply because they were created before the Vampire existed?  You aren't discounting WinUAE as a development environment even though it doesn't even emulate a Vampire and was developed years before the Vampire was even an idea.
           
And you obviously didn't look too closely at AmiDevCpp, it is a Windows-based cross-compiler by the way.  Here's an entire page of example projects, all in C/C++:
     
           
EXTERNAL LINK       
           
And here's a list of AmiDevCpp developer packs for AROS, SDL, Reaction, MUI, etc...the AROS SDK dev pack is dated 2015, so how much "newer" are you looking for?
           
     
EXTERNAL LINK           
           
If you desire to program in assembly for the Vampire several people have recommended DevPac 3.18 which isn't totally Vampire-ready out-of-the-box, or you can use VASM which supports the the Vampire's new 68080 instructions right now.
     
EXTERNAL LINK       
           
Looking for new tools to conduct retro-programming is an oxymoron.
     
Right now the only option is to use existing tools which have been patched or modified to support the new instruction set.  I really don't see anyone needing or wanting to recreate the "development wheel" so to speak by creating a "new" developer app for a retro computer.
           

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