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Roadmap for Apollo & Vampire2page  1 2 3 4 5 

Wawa T

Posts 695
24 Feb 2016 00:10


>Does your AMIGA has already rom chip with driver for our SD-Card interface included?
for the purpose of having device available at boot time amiga expansions usually have a driver in their rom, instead of a full copy of kickstart inclusive additional modules. this should work both with aos and aros i guess.


Ian Parsons

Posts 230
24 Feb 2016 00:40


But the base hardware doesn't use auto-config. So support for IDE is included in kickstart. SD-Card is part of the base specification of a Vampire II "Amiga" (upgraded or stand alone), inclusion of support in the ROM keeps it simple.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
24 Feb 2016 06:44


Wawa, as you certainly know Commodore produced many AMIGA 600 with a ROM version of 2.0 which does not even support IDE properly.
As you might also know there were other batches of A600 produced which have the ROM chip soldered to the mainboard - so these AMIGA can not replace the ROM easily.

Its crystal clear that you need to include the KICK rom in the accelerator card to support these machines.
If you want the Vampire to run standalone you also need to include the Kick in the Vampire.
Also if you want to once provide a 1 MB AROS Kick the most elegant way is to include the Kick in the rom.
Also if you want once the OS to support 64bit you need to change EXEC and provide the Kick with improved EXEC in the rom.

Is the question now clear to you?



Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
24 Feb 2016 07:20


Is the KICK Rom 1 megabyte? Is that big enough?


Samuel Crow

Posts 424
24 Feb 2016 14:54


Thierry Atheist wrote:

Is the KICK Rom 1 megabyte? Is that big enough?

Amiga Kickstart was 512k.  Ours will be 1 meg.  If we run into trouble, there is another thing we can do similar to PPLoadSeg to squeeze more in.


Wawa T

Posts 695
24 Feb 2016 22:15


Samuel Crow wrote:

 
Thierry Atheist wrote:

  Is the KICK Rom 1 megabyte? Is that big enough?
 

  Amiga Kickstart was 512k.  Ours will be 1 meg.  If we run into trouble, there is another thing we can do similar to PPLoadSeg to squeeze more in.
 

 
  i think having kickstart somewhere  in flash there is no limit to how big that is.


Wawa T

Posts 695
24 Feb 2016 22:17


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

 
  Is the question now clear to you?
 

for a standalone system a kickstart is neccessary, for an expansion card it has advantages and disadvantages. one of disadvantages is the dependability of partners neccessary to license it. for the time being i simply assume, you know what you do.


Mohican / AMs

Posts 6
27 Feb 2016 02:09


Did you plan clock port header to Apollo-Vampire500 ?
(for USB or something else which connect with it)




Michal Warzecha

Posts 209
27 Feb 2016 10:48


If I rememeber correctly, there is an expansion port on Vampire boards. FPGA is flexible, so, many features can be added in future.


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic

Posts 189
05 Mar 2016 09:40


Okay, i really, really want one, but currently i have no A600 and i read Kipper2K got swamped with e-mails from people that want to buy one.

Now from what I've read is that the A500 version is close to release.
Now i do have a very mint A500+ sitting here, so it would be an option to buy the A500 version.
But will the A500 version have a built in Ethernet ?
If not then I'm stuck waiting for the A1200 version, since there is next to nothing for decently networking an A500.


Daniel Sevo

Posts 299
06 Mar 2016 00:14


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic wrote:

  But will the A500 version have a built in Ethernet ?
  If not then I'm stuck waiting for the A1200 version, since there is next to nothing for decently networking an A500.

Plipbox works well enough ;-)
EXTERNAL LINK


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic

Posts 189
06 Mar 2016 06:55


Cool device, serial to ethernet to network an A500.
It will be slow though since the parallel port only does about 20 KB/sec max.
I'll wait for the A1200 version of the vampire or buy an A600 and a vampire.



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
06 Mar 2016 09:21


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic wrote:

Cool device, serial to ethernet to network an A500.
It will be slow though since the parallel port only does about 20 KB/sec max.

Your number might be right with an 68000 but with a faster CPU like APOLLO it should be a lot more....




Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic

Posts 189
06 Mar 2016 11:44


@Gunnar
 
I got this number from experience with my A1200 back in the day, transferring data trough parallel port with a windows pc.
My A1200 back then was equipped with a Apollo 68040 40Mhz card.
Technically i do not know at what speed the parallel will max out and what the exact constraints/bottlenecks are.
 
With the Blizzard ppc (with 68040/25Mhz and 603e 240Mhz ppc) I had ZorrIV busboard connected with a X-surf Zorro II/III network card and that maxed out at around 400 KB/sec if I remember correctly (the 040/25 was the limiting factor indeed)
 
But it seems I'm getting my hands on a decent A600, and the A1200 version of the vampire I'm going to buy anyway.
Though it's tempting to also buy the A500 version and have all 3 of them :-)
Then my A500+ will be an A500++ ;-)
 


Roman S.

Posts 149
09 Mar 2016 16:14


Sorry if I'm asking too early, but do you have some more concrete plans for the standalone unit? I mean:

1) board size - mini-ITX, or something compatible with A1200 cases, or something else?

2) ports - are you going to include:

- Amiga 500/1200 keyboard slot?
- Amiga floppy drive connector?
- clockport(s)? - for RTC and/or USB controller
- serial / paralel ports?
- amiga mouse / joysticks?
- ethernet?



John William

Posts 563
09 Mar 2016 21:36


These what I want for a stand alone:

1) USB (lots of those)
2) Amiga floppy drive connector that is only compatible with Amiga floppy disk drive
3) build in clock on the motherboard with safe long, long battery
4) Amiga/Joystick ports (that is c64/atari/msx/amiga style and compatible with all joysticks that works on the ports.
5) Ethernet (must)
6) PCie express ports
7) an a graphics port allows you to use modern PC video cards (of course the driver remains to be the issue here)
8) External Amiga disk drive port (in case ya need an external disk drive)

Of course...I am dreaming to have a cheaper version of the standalone where pcie express ports removed, video card port removed, fewer USB port and installed into A500/A1200 like style.

But for a big box stand alone you get the mentioned above and more :)

That is my thinking! I am also hoping the motherboard is big in size and not tiny pocket size.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
09 Mar 2016 22:23


My wishlist standalone system would look like this:

* AMIGA chipset ECS/AGA
* SAGA - truecolor up to FULLHD
* High speed 64bit APOLLO 68k  ~ 5 times faster than 68060@50
  Fast enough to smooth play Videos in 640 resolution
* 1 Gigabyte Fastmem
* Ethernet
* Mouse/Joyport
* USB
* SDCard for Hardrive

* Effortable price


John William

Posts 563
10 Mar 2016 04:20


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

My wishlist standalone system would look like this:
 
 
  * AMIGA chipset ECS/AGA
  * SAGA - truecolor up to FULLHD
  * High speed 64bit APOLLO 68k  ~ 5 times faster than 68060@50
    Fast enough to smooth play Videos in 640 resolution
  * 1 Gigabyte Fastmem
  * Ethernet
  * Mouse/Joyport
  * USB
  * SDCard for Hardrive
 
  * Effortable price

Can we have it 10 times faster instead of 5 times? It would be super awesome to have a 6860 @ 500 Mhz (real 500 Mhz mind) over said 6060 @ 250 Mhz :) Just my thought.

If we can have 400 to 500 mips that would be unbelievable!! :D



Teemu Korvenpää

Posts 26
10 Mar 2016 04:53


Gunnar!  These are perfect + 16bit audio


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic

Posts 189
10 Mar 2016 09:14


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

My wishlist standalone system would look like this:
 
 
  * AMIGA chipset ECS/AGA
  * SAGA - truecolor up to FULLHD
  * High speed 64bit APOLLO 68k  ~ 5 times faster than 68060@50
    Fast enough to smooth play Videos in 640 resolution
  * 1 Gigabyte Fastmem
  * Ethernet
  * Mouse/Joyport
  * USB
  * SDCard for Hardrive
 
  * Effortable price

Sounds good to me :)
No more dependency on old hardware that will fail rather sooner then later :)
A sata port would be nice for connecting cd/dvd device or SSD.
A USB dvd/cd rom player would also be an option.
I'm not a fan of optical media but it could be nice for installing OS3.9



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