Vampire 600 V2 - Amiga 600 FPGA accelerator Pre-order

I am interested.

With out me reading all of the thread, has anyone got a time on the release of this board or is it as and when, as I fancy one but don't want to wait for weeks...

@Megamix "cant wait for weeks"? Amiga folks count everything in years ;-)
To be clear.. only Majsta himself could give am estimate but its safe to assume he's in the middle of testing....
Out of curiosity..Why can't you wait for weeks? You need an accelerator for the A600 here and now?

The curiosity from me is how far off they are, for me I just want to get the little A600 I have up and running with a little more power and memory.

This will be compatible with a full 020 core as i understand it.
Where is this code supplied? From Majsta?

Also will there be one with the 030 version?
what are the differences between 020 and 030 except the speed?

To avoid a long and potentially off topic discussion I suggest you check wikipedia for differences between 020 and 030, but short story is that the Vampire uses the Apollo core developed by the Phoenix / Apollo team lead by Gunnar von Boen.
The core is not a pure copy of a 020. It is in fact a new and improved 68xxx core even better than 060 in some respects but keeping it compatible with 020... it currently lacks FPU, not sure about the status of the MMU.

But as a simplification it is fair to see the core as something like a 250MHz 68020 even though it really isnt.
The team thats working on the FPGA Arcade (google it) are much closer to what you could call a pure 020 core.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eXeler0

To avoid a long and potentially off topic discussion I suggest you check wikipedia for differences between 020 and 030, but short story is that the Vampire uses the Apollo core developed by the Phoenix / Apollo team lead by Gunnar von Boen.
The core is not a pure copy of a 020. It is in fact a new and improved 68xxx core even better than 060 in some respects but keeping it compatible with 020... it currently lacks FPU, not sure about the status of the MMU.

But as a simplification it is fair to see the core as something like a 250MHz 68020 even though it really isnt.
The team thats working on the FPGA Arcade (google it) are much closer to what you could call a pure 020 core.

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Would you really need an FPU or MMU?
I googled it and the answers was basically "no, you don't", but there are other accelarators that offers it, what would be the point of it for a non-dev user?
Wouldn't it be enough to just have the Phoenix core v2000 and a graphics accelerator (Maybe that is already in the Phoenix core?)

Short answer is that there are some uses for both.
Stuff like Shapeshifter Mac emulator requires MMU (if I remember right), games like Quake use the FPU along with 3d rendering software (Although, who would render on Amigas these days) and some demos.
As for FPU, for compatibility reasons you can emulate the FPU on CPU.
I dont know all the details but its already done on Amigas. The FPUs on 040 and 060 are simplified compared to 68882. So instructions not supported in hardware are intercepted and emulated in software. I suppose Phoenix could do the same...

Thanks for the answers! I feel my noob head is growing :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eXeler0

Short answer is that there are some uses for both.
Stuff like Shapeshifter Mac emulator requires MMU (if I remember right), games like Quake use the FPU along with 3d rendering software (Although, who would render on Amigas these days) and some demos.
As for FPU, for compatibility reasons you can emulate the FPU on CPU.
I dont know all the details but its already done on Amigas. The FPUs on 040 and 060 are simplified compared to 68882. So instructions not supported in hardware are intercepted and emulated in software. I suppose Phoenix could do the same...

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well, shapeshifter doesn't really require an mmu, it messes with CPU supervisor mode. An mmu is useful for protecting mac rom from writes and also to speed up screen refresh updating only the changed parts.

a 060-like fpu would be handy as software usually assumes it's present.