O: Apollo core

Chlapi, vy ste taky vyklepaný jak Startky. Já musel upgradovat přes USB Blaster, páč v Amize se mi to furt stavělo na zadní. A to byl teprve hardcore a ke všemu to klaplo až na druhý pokus... )

O: Apollo core

Apollo Team Activity Report (March 2019)

Vampire V1200

Majsta, with the help of Claude (aka the NSFW shaolin monk), are working on bringing up the Vampire V1200. Things are coming along and Igor has already shown very positive results some weeks ago. Card is booting nicely at the moment at x6 speed (hint: base clock of A1200 is twice the A500 ;-P).

Amiga 1200 is a special beast and all its revision have very different behavior which we need to go through each of them methodically. We should not assume because we have it working on some very common and widespread revision like the 1D4 that it will be the same with others. Some other A1200 accelerators even needed fixes on motherboard to make them work correctly. Our goal is to avoid modifying A1200 boards **at all**.

We also want to think smart about mechanical part of the Vampire 1200 and we hope to bring a way for users to swap out devices from the Vampire without having to open their case. By the way, we will also make sure that Vampire 1200 is compatible with the original Commodore case and A1200.net remastered version.

If not already done, it might be time to get your A1200 ready by having it recapped by a professional (we have several in the community).

GOLD2.12

Team is gathering some various fixes and little improvements which happened during the V4 Standalone development. These changes can easily be back-ported to Vampire V2 GOLD2 core branch :
- Mouse hotspot and editable hardware sprite support (requires driver update)
- Auto-turtle mode when game is running in ChipRAM (improves game compatibility)
- 15-bit PC / 16-bit PC / 32-bit ARG and 32-bit BGR modes support (driver improvement)
- morelibspace command not required anymore for AfAOS users (saves a reboot)
- Core revision in a register

Vampire V4

Work has been going on smoothly on the Vampire V4 Standalone during past months. Chris is actually busy working on the onboard Ethernet chip and Gunnar improved core by a great margin on the chipset part. Jens « DeepSubMicron » also jumped in V4 VHDL development and is adding nice features to core to get inputs working in a seamless manner.

We are now in a state where the Vampire V4 Standalone could nearly be sold, even if all features would not be yet enabled (that’s one of the main point of FPGA technology and we could take advantage of it).

Production-wise, discussions are on-going right now with local and trustworthy companies to make the dream come true.

Vampire V2

Majsta will receive another Vampire 600 batch within next weeks. Some required chips were delayed and things weren’t as fast as we expected but things should be on track for middle of April.

AROS 68k

Thanks to wawa and kalamatee, AROS 68k support got improved, beginning on the IDE compatibility side. This was a long lasting issue that finally got solved. Tests builds are booting now every time up to the Workbench. This opens the door to much faster improvement on AROS 68k.

EmuTOS

Lot of things are also moving in the EmuTOS world to embrace the Vampire : a new fVDI driver is on the work to speed things up, FastIDE support has been successfully added and MapROM is fully working now.

O: Apollo core

Tak uz se nam blizi k dispozici je GOLD2.12 Release Candidate 1 APOLLO Core Update pro Vampire V600 / V500 V2(+).

Core obsahuje
* New 15/16bits RTG modes (R5G5B5PC, B8G8R8A8 )
* HW mouse improvements (sprite area size, x/y-position coords)
* New minimal boot pic with melody
* SLOW CPU when PC in chipmem & rangermem (auto Turtle, select "ExpChip" with WHDLoad)
* Improved Turtle Mode compatibility
* Enabled faster 32bit write for the IDE
* Improved rebooting, when using a MAPROM
* Updated EmuTOS ROM to 0.9.11 release
* VampireSupport 40.30

Apollo Team Activity Report (Srpen 2020)

Vampire V4 Standalone

A gigantic number of hours has been spent on the graphic subsystem during last months and core went nearly through a complete rework of it.

Coming from core revision 7383, we can highlight improvements from that new 7649 release:

• Lots of AGA improvements increasing number of AGA games working perfectly
• Full support of Amiga mouse on DB9 port
• Support of Picture-in-Picture for applications like RiVA, meaning that a fullscreen can now be displayed into a window. In other terms, you could now play a video in a Workbench 1.3 window.

• New improved audio channel features
o Audio 16bit long sample support 64MB
o Audio more volume bits
o Audio free positioning /panning L/R
o Audio one-shoot mode

• New improved Sprite Feature
o Sprite 16 color mode
o Sprite 256 own reserved Sprite color register
o Sprite Indirect mode, making Sprite maintenance much easier to code

• 32-bit Copper
• ModeID video feature - which allows easier coding of Chunky screens
• Chunky is now fully in sync with VBL
• Chunky is now programmable by copper

Biggest noticeable change is now that core will display a fixed resolution and merge Amiga native output and RTG in it. Lower resolution than the one displayed are scaled into that fixed resolution meaning that you will not get anymore those constant resolutions changes like with previous core and experience an instant screen opening.

Some choices had to be done to find best compromise between displaying Workbench in an usable resolution while maintaining good scaling quality for games. In current stage, incoming core will open a 960x540 resolution on your monitor and display perfectly any WHDLoad game. Disadvantage of this is that Workbench cannot display higher than 960x540 at the moment. We might be thinking about providing a core with 720p resolution but with a “not so good” scaling of WHDLoad games to fulfil wishes of everyone.

Because of this big change, a driver update is required and SAGA Driver Package is updated accordingly from version 2.3.



AROS and ApolloOS

The decision was made in team to fork the existing AROS source-code in order to speed up the development of its m68k branch. The reasoning of this choice is that AROS embeds at the moment a lot of code for different platforms (x86, ARM, 68k) which is not relevant in our case. Being able to remove all that unused code will ease development (shorter compile time, easier understanding of code), bring quickly improvements on the table and possibly improve performance of the bunch.

Our goal is to improve AROS 68k support and level up its compatibility with AmigaOS3 to the best state possible. Embracing that goal, some brave team volunteers started to maintain that fork and code is fully available on GitHub: EXTERNAL LINK

If you are interested into digging in it, complete and easy compiling instructions are available here: EXTERNAL LINK

To show and demonstrate improvements made, team also started to work on a complete distribution based on it, called ApolloOS which can be downloaded and tested here in its last build:
EXTERNAL LINK

GOLD2.13

Thanks to the effort and devotion of team, the GOLD2 branch for V2 accelerators is still evolving with the goal to improve that branch as much as possible. We all know that FPGA for V500 and V600 is very full but that does not forbid us to bring on fixes for them.

GOLD2.13 will bring improvements on those topics:
• On V1200, both motherboard IDE, PCMCIA, and Vampire FastIDE will be working at the same time
• On V1200, ChipRAM speed has been bumped to 7.0MB/s, bringing now the fastest ChipRAM bandwidth available with any A1200 accelerator
• Backport of unified turtle mode V4 with PCR bit, meaning now that Turtle Mode can survive reboots if needed (for i.e. games or demos on floppies)
• FPU fixes on FSQRT instruction

No ETA yet, some work is still required to bring it to a state where we are will happy and confident upon its release.


We are moving from Slack to Discord

Slack has been very useful for the V4 support channel at beginning but we are seeing a lot of limitation that can barely be lifted even with the paid version. It is why we have been testing Discord for some weeks to make sure that if we ask people on Slack to move, it would offer them a better experience.

Discord has quite a lot of benefits over Slack:
• No loss of history, you can rewind logs ad vitam aeternam
• Built-in video conferencing feature
• Mobile app is faster than Slack’s
• It’s been used by a lot of people in the retroscene, switching from one server to the other is made with a single click

To support that transition as smoothly as possible, a bridge between Slack and Discord has been set up so you will not miss anything if you are a bit late in joining Discord.

In next days, an email will be sent to all Vampire customers to inform them about the existence of that new Discord server.

Link to our Discord server : EXTERNAL LINK

Production

If you were not living on the hidden side of the moon for the last 6 months, you might have noticed that our world had to endure some unexpected events because of COVID-19. This had a direct and instant impact on production of Vampire boards and will probably continue to show its effect until things get better around the planet and especially in China.

Like nearly any hardware manufacturer, we do source our parts in Asia and are enduring huge delivery delays, when things can even be delivered, since some shipments even got lost. Someone committing today on an ETA or saying that delivery problems are solved is obviously wrong and should not be trusted.

There is a lot of demand for Vampire boards that we were already struggling to fulfill but that pandemic situation just did put even more pressure on our shoulders.

We are very sorry for it and since this is out of our control, we expect your comprehension and patience. It will take time but we are not forgetting any of you.

Positive side of that sanitary confinement is that since we could not focus on production, we had the opportunity to improve some processes of it for the future. For example, the Vampire V4 Standalone had some layout improvements which removes some manual solder steps. So when we will again be able to produce, it should go faster than it was before.

Software

On the software side, we have new Vampire related applications materializing at the moment:
• Milkytracker is getting full native Vampire Audio support thanks for the repeated efforts of neoman and Marlon
• Alynna Trypnotk is working currently on a bootable version of the microSD driver. You can follow that work here : EXTERNAL LINK
• Jan made his AmiKit distro compatible with Vampire V2 and V4 : EXTERNAL LINK

Zminuji se tam od GOLD 2.13 pro V2, tedy A500 a A600, ale vetsina poznamek je o funkcnosti A1200, PCMCIA....tak to moc nechapu.

Standaloine by měla být "A1200" jestli se nepletu?

???

Na tom neni moc co nechapat. Vyvoj jadra pro V2 akceleratory tj. V500, V600 a V1200 je do jiste miry spolecny. Neco je specificke jen pro V1200, takze proto je tam u nekterych zmen poznamka V1200, ale treba ten turtle mod a oprava implementace FPU je spolecna pro vsechny varianty.

Nova verze jadra pro Vampire4 nestihla vanoce jak bylo puvodne planovano, ale uz je venku!

Release #5

* Copper compatibility fixed.
We found a bug in Copper and fixed it. This fixes a high number of games which before were displayed not perfectly.

* CPU speed up. We are working on /testing CPU improvements which will give you about 10 MIPS speedup. Our target score is 165 Mips.

* H.D.M.I Monitor compatibility improvement
Right now a few monitors not like the V4 signal.
We work on fixing this.

* More Screenmodes. We will add more Screenmodes to the monitor drivers allowing you to e.g. access 800x600,1024*768

* Deluxe Galaga works now on APOLLOS

* RiVa Video Player PIP improvement!
Smoother truecolor Video Playback for the Workbench

* ApollOS Kids edition with all games child safe!

* Magic PAL/NTSC Hotkey
(You can even during runtime switch your Amiga video out to PAL/NTSC50/NTSC). This allows running games like an PAL or NTSC Amiga.


Do teto verze se pravdepodobne nedostalo nasledujici, tak snad priste...

* WHDLOAD improvements. We work on enabling many more games for ApollOS. In the hope that all your old game favorites will be available to run on ApollOS for you.

* Porting a secret new Game!!

* Interleaved Audio Stereo Channel mode.
This new mode allows 1 audio channel to play back a stereo 16bit stream. This means only 1 audio channel is needed then for full CD quality Audio. This mode will make game porting easier and also help Atari/Emutos audio.

Release #6 je predbezne planovan na brezen 2021

Soustredit se bude vedle opravy nalezenych chyb na implementaci 3D-Core, coz se tyka hlavne Vampire4, ale zaroven je planovana nova verze pro V1200 a to vcetne MAGIE.

Codename of the 3D unit is right now "MAGIE" – MAgic Grafik Interpolation Engine.

The Apollo-3D-Unit add to the Amiga hardware texture map features, which allows games never seen on Amiga before.

The Texture Unit supports TRUECOLOR textures, HW Light support and 16bit modes.
The idea is to offload texture mapping.

The MAGIE unit
- has own DMA
- supports compressed truecolor textures (today supports textures of: 32x32/64x64/128x128/256x256/512x512)
- supports HW Light/Gouraud shading

The MAGIE HW unit offer a speedup of 100 times compared to doing the same texture operation it in software (asm) with an 68060 CPU.

Bude ještě někdy nějaké aktualizované játro pro Vapmíra 500 V2? Nebo jsem měl počkat a pořídit PiStorm?

Vampír V2+ jede jako hodinky i se stávajícím jádrem. Nicméně na apollo fóru to dle mého názoru pomalu skomírá. Čekám na Vampire pro A1200 už cca rok a pořád ticho. Vypadá to, že se snaží prodávat V4.

Vzhladom na velkost FPGA medzi V4 a ostatnymi vampirmi team rozhodol, ze nebude dalej pokracovat na vyvoji AGA emulacie pre V2 500/V2 600, lebo sa do ich FPGA nevojde (tzv. Core 3)
Gunnar mi vsak potvrdil, ze akonahle doladia SuperAGA funkcionality vo V4, tak ich backportuju aj do V2/V1200, spolu so 16-bit. zvukom ARNE.
Viac tu: http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=35489

I me ta 500 V2 prijde uplne v pohode jak je.

Ale tak to je dobře, já AGA mašinu z 2k dělat nepotřeboval. Jen jsem doufal, že třeba zvládnou emulovat větší chip RAM, nebo tak, abych nemusel kupovat MegaCHIP...