For Sale Apollo FIREBIRD New Accelerator Card for AMIGA500 68080 CPU 100 MHz and 1024MB RAM

[Apollo]

V4 FIREBIRD GIGA​

CPU Accelerator for A500/A1000
For A2000 we recommend the V4 SALAMANDER
For A600 we recommend the V4 MANTICORE
For A1200 we recommend the V4 ICEDRAKE

The new V4 FIREBIRD GIGA has all the beautiful options and features the V4 FIREBIRD offers you!
On top you have gorgeous 1024 memory DDR3 RAM, directly usable by ApolloOS, and Amiga OS, develop on your Amiga without limitation and finally you have enough memory to compile even biggest Amiga programs.

Allows you to play AGA games on your A500!

Key Features:

• CPU: Apollo 68080 AMMX with 64-bit support
• Memory: 1024 MB DDR3 (6 MB ChipRAM)
• Video: SAGA RTG, Truecolor 32-bit, 1280x720 / 1920x1080 FULLHD
  Audio:8/16-bit, 56 kHz, 24-bit mixing, 16 DMA voices
• powerful 3D MAGGI Texture acceleration unit (part of Amigablitter) with Hardware Truecolor texturing with Bilinear interpolation and Light and Shadow, Gouraud and Zbuffer support
• 2x FastIDE controller (CompactFlash and CD-ROM)
• USB ports (for joypad/mouse)
• 100Mbit Ethernet RJ45 port with DMA
• Digital Audio/Video out
• Build in flickerfixer / enjoy interlace Amiga screens without flicker!
• AGA support - play AGA Amiga games!
• microSD card port (for data exchange)
• EXPANSION PORTS for adding more

This card allows you to finally play AGA games on your Amiga 500.
You can natively play Amiga AGA games like Aladin AGA, Banshee AGA, or Reshoot AGA

Bonus: The Accelerator Card comes ready to use with IDE/CF Adapter and with CF Flashdrive preinstalled with ApolloOS.

From our latest production batch I can offer you 2 cards.
These cards are brand new and come with warranty.

Price for outside Europe Union €588 plus postage (price is without VAT)
Price for inside Europe Union €699 plus postage (price is with VAT)

 

[klx300r]

how is the compatibility with apps and games running only AmigaOS3.2?

 

[Apollo]

how is the compatibility with apps and games running only AmigaOS3.2?

You have free choice and can run ANY Amiga OS you want.
You can run old school Amiga OS 1.2 or 1.3, or the later 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, - you can run them all - absolutely no problems.
You can also run the new ApolloOS or even AtariOS (Emutos) or Mac OS 7/8

The Game compatibility is actually good.
As you might know some old games have big problems with Motorola 68060 CPU.
The Motorola 060 CPU lacks some old instructions - which makes some games like Speedball crash. The Apollo 68080 does not have this problem as it supports all 68k instructions. This means games using these instructions like Speedball run just fine.

There are also a few old games that stumble if the CPU is very fast.
Also for this you have a solution:
The Apollo 68080 CPU can run in 4 speed modes, which you can select.
You can run it in speed of an upgraded A500, I recommend this for running very old games like Bubble Bobble.
You can run it in speed of an upgraded A1200, I recommend to use this for running most AGA Amiga games.
You can select to run with speed on an 060 CPU... and in full speed (which is faster than 060 of course).

While many games and most applications have no problem with a faster CPU,
there are a few old oddballs which can get confused if your CPU is very fast.

For example Hybris and Bubble Bobble get confused when the CPU runs at max speed
the Hybris music will then play to fast and Bubble Bobble will also run to fast.
But as the CPU allows you to select to run in legacy/slow speed for better game compatibility = you can easily correct this by setting CPU Speed = A500.
With correct setting both games play correctly!

Another important compatibility improvement that the Apollo68080 CPU offers is that is support to some way "selfmodifying code". Some old games did something what is called selfmodifying code.
This means the game /demo did change its own code...
This technique worked perfectly on 68000/68010 CPU but gave problems on later CPU and is reason many old games crash on 68040 and 68060. The APOLLO 68080 CPU caches offer a new special technique which is makes them coherent.
This means many selfmodify coding which crashes on 040 and 060 does work fine on Apollo 68080.


The card can play both OCS games, which means Amiga 500 games like
Archon, Arkanoid, Turrican, Giana Sister = you name them
And also you can play AGA games (A1200 games) like Banshee AGA or Disney Aladin or Lionking

And you can select if you want to run in OCS or AGA mode - this allows to you run OCS games or demos which did some coding techniques that NOT worked on AGA and which Not played on A1200.
But you can play them too!

 

[klx300r]

You have free choice and can run ANY Amiga OS you want.
You can run old school Amiga OS 1.2 or 1.3, or the later 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, - you can run them all - absolutely no problems.
You can also run the new ApolloOS or even AtariOS (Emutos) or Mac OS 7/8

The Game compatibility is actually good.
As you might know some old games have big problems with Motorola 68060 CPU.
The Motorola 060 CPU lacks some old instructions - which makes some games like Speedball crash. The Apollo 68080 does not have this problem as it supports all 68k instructions. This means games using these instructions like Speedball run just fine.

There are also a few old games that stumble if the CPU is very fast.
Also for this you have a solution:
The Apollo 68080 CPU can run in 4 speed modes, which you can select.
You can run it in speed of an upgraded A500, I recommend this for running very old games like Bubble Bobble.
You can run it in speed of an upgraded A1200, I recommend to use this for running most AGA Amiga games.
You can select to run with speed on an 060 CPU... and in full speed (which is faster than 060 of course).

While many games and most applications have no problem with a faster CPU,
there are a few old oddballs which can get confused if your CPU is very fast.

For example Hybris and Bubble Bobble get confused when the CPU runs at max speed
the Hybris music will then play to fast and Bubble Bobble will also run to fast.
But as the CPU allows you to select to run in legacy/slow speed for better game compatibility = you can easily correct this by setting CPU Speed = A500.
With correct setting both games play correctly!


The card can play both OCS games, which means Amiga 500 games like
Archon, Arkanoid, Turrican, Giana Sister = you name them
And also you can play AGA games (A1200 games) like Banshee AGA or Disney Aladin or Lionking

And you can select if you want to run in OCS or AGA mode - this allows to you run OCS games or demos which did some coding techniques that NOT worked on AGA and which Not played on A1200.
But you can play them too!

Cool stuff & thanks for the explanation

 

[Apollo]

But lets be very clear and totally honest.

There is simply nothing like 100% compatibility on Amiga.

1)There were some games which ran on Amiga 1000 with kickstart 1.1
but which not ran on Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3
=Archon is one example for such a game.
It has coding bugs in using Sprites with OS system calls and not works with Kickstart 1.3 and later.

2) There are number of demos which ran fine on AMIGA chipset of Amiga 1000/500
but which break on chipset of Amiga600 or Amiga 1200.
DMA datafetch and Stop values on the first chipset only allowed certain values
e.g. 30 / 38 and values like 32 or 34 were handled like 30/38
Later chipsets changed this behavior which made some games/demos suddenly break.
I speak here from one experience, some of my own old demos from A1000 failed on later chipsets because of this.

3) Some games handcraft data on the stack and depend on the stackframe of the CPU.
The exception stack frame for the 68000 is different to later CPU.
So simply changing the CPU could cause some rare program doing this "hack" to break.


What I try to say ... The Amiga has many thousands of nice Games and Demos...
And many have small coding issues or sometimes dependencies to certain kickstart version or are depending on running on the 68000 and will break on 68010 or higher models.
So the honest answer can not be that you can ever get 100% compatibility.


I hope its clear what I try to say?

 

[muteki]

Let's say I put a Firebird V4 in my 500 and try to compare compatibility to a 1200+Pistorm when running WHDLoad games and demos, which is a good candidate in terms of compatibility, how would it compare?
I think with the Pistorm wrapper project it has now reached a near 98% (maybe more) on the WHDLoad set of games.

 

[Apollo]

In my opinion the Firebird has many advantages

Let me list some:

1) I think the general compatibility rate on the FIrebird is higher

2) You can on the Firebird run both games that work ONLY on OCS
and also games working only on AGA. You can not do this on the A1200.
For example many old World of Wonder demos not work on AGA.
This means you can run more games then an A1200 could.

3) You have on the Firebird a build in De-interlacer/Flickerfixer which allows to use games/programs using an interlaced screens and this use this in good quality.
This means games like Simcity are really usable now.
Of course you could add this feature to your A1200 by adding something like extra invision flickerfixer and spendign an extra $200 for this.

4) And last but not least you can play game utilizing Super-AGA screenmodes and features like "Apollo Invaders" or the new "Robin Hood". There are only a handful games and demos today but among them are some real jewels.


The Firebird allows you the add AGA to your Amiga 500/1000.

I believe this alone is a pretty cool feature...
not to mention the Apollo 68080 CPU,
* truecolor GFX card
* the very fast Ethernetchip with true DMA,
* the 16 channel 16bit/24bit Amiga Audio chipset,
* the very fast IDE Amiga Chipset
* And extra- features like Flickerfixer on top.


You will agree the card offers a lot of features.

If you follow our project then you know that our goal is to constantly improve that cards.
Features like the Flickerfixer for example were last year not available, but came as free upgrade for users. And if you follow channel today then you might have seen that we are testing right now a new feature upgrade very similar to a build in Gotek....

 

[a4Kuse]

Why is outside cheaper than inside Europe?

 

[Apollo]

Why is outside cheaper than inside Europe?

this is easy to explain..
Inside the EU you have to pay European VAT... +20%
Outside not...

 

[Deleted member 3331]

Not correct : VAT is to pay in state of destination (in theory...) . So it can change. Italy is 22%. If you sell in "private" way is a NO SENSE including VAT in a striclty legal way, VAT is only for new items in official shops. NOT in private selling. So you can apply VAT only if you sell in your shop, NOT here

 

[darefail]

Not correct : VAT is to pay in state of destination (in theory...) . So it can change. Italy is 22%. If you sell in "private" way is a NO SENSE including VAT in a striclty legal way, VAT is only for new items in official shops. NOT in private selling. So you can apply VAT only if you sell in your shop, NOT here

Very true!

 

[Apollo]

So you can apply VAT only if you sell in your shop, NOT here

If this card would be a private and second hand sale yes...

But please note that I'm the engineer and developer of the card and of the Apollo 68080 CPU.
And the offered card is brand new and fresh from manufacturing.

I would genuine love to give you the cards without VAT to save you guys money.
We are all Amiga fans and if I can see a way to make this cheaper for you - I would love to do this.
As this is an official sale of a brand new card which came out just a few weeks ago - i can officially not offer it in Europe without VAT.

 

[darefail]

Second hand has nothing to do as many shops sell second hand with VAT.

It is understood only if this is your one and only job.

 

[Deleted member 3331]

So you must sell with INVOICE from official shop. And VAT must change for different nations, so price will be different from Italy to Germany for example (like stated on your official website)

 

[Xanxi]

Not correct : VAT is to pay in state of destination (in theory...) . So it can change. Italy is 22%. If you sell in "private" way is a NO SENSE including VAT in a striclty legal way, VAT is only for new items in official shops. NOT in private selling. So you can apply VAT only if you sell in your shop, NOT here

It must be clarified if Apollo is here as an official Apollo seller or as a private person, and then if there is a warranty and after sale service.