My Vampire V2

[khimru]

It doesn't yet but it is headed that way. Getting SAGA is a big step along the way to get some of the custom chips into the FPGA. And I think they plan on doing Paula emulation as well so they can send it through the HDMI output?

Well, the ONLY way to make the system blazing-fast is to move ALL "fast" (chipram, Agnus, Denise, etc) components into an FPGA: otherwise they would always bottleneck the whole thing. They could leave the choice of an emulated Paula or real one to the user (although it's probably not possible to use real one with HDMI). Yes, this would turn A600 into a fancy I/O card & keyboard, but why does THAT matter? If you want authentic thing you could just turn Vampire V2 off...

As long as you could take authentic Amiga floppy with authentic Amiga game, put it in the floppy drive and boot it - it's "authentic enough" for most users. I really hope that eventually this way we could get to the "revived Amiga". Who the hell cares what's inside (RPi, Minimig or whatever). If it looks like read thing, works like real thing (only faster) then does it even matter if it uses fancy FPGA or even ARM CPU + emulator? Currently the problem is that we could emulate the "core" of Amiga in FPGA pretty well, but lots of smallish things are hard to emulate (floppy drive interface, keyboard, etc - they ALL could be emulated, of course, but that's A LOT OF work) thus Vampire V2 makes a lot of sense, but if we could eventually put it all into FPGA... then why not?

 

[Pgovotsos]

quite a few fixes

<snip>

* improved Game compatibility
(some games running to slow)
Instruction execution in chip mem is speed up now

Does this mean that chip memory is now emulated (I know that's probably not the best word - hopefully you know what I mean) in the FPGA or somewhere else ON the Vampire II board and the "real" chip memory on the A600's motherboard or trapdoor expansions like the a603, a604 or a604n?

In other words do you need the trapdoor expansion at all any more? Can you still have a trapdoor expansion installed so you can use clockport expansions like the Subway for USB?

Or am I just reading too much into the change log and "all" they have done is optimized the way the Vampire II accesses the motherboard / trapdoor chip memory?

 

[Sardine]

I have no idea, I guess I could pull my 1mb chip ram expansion out and see,, but i think it still uses the original chip ram. will check.

 

[Pgovotsos]

I have no idea, I guess I could pull my 1mb chip ram expansion out and see,, but i think it still uses the original chip ram. will check.

Thanks. I understand the broad strokes of the Vampire II but some of little details like how the chip ram works elude me. The other one came when I just was reading through kipper2k & majsta's posts one I & II. In the description of V1 it says that the 64MB of memory is Zorro III memory. I just sat staring at the screen for 10 minutes trying to figure that out. How do you get Zorro III memory on a 600 and what do you gain? Is it really Zorro III or do they just mean as fast as Zorro III?

Yeah, I know, I should ask them that question. I really shouldn't post on forums at 4 in the morning

Take care all!

 

[demolition]

Does this mean that chip memory is now emulated (I know that's probably not the best word - hopefully you know what I mean) in the FPGA or somewhere else ON the Vampire II board
Or am I just reading too much into the change log and "all" they have done is optimized the way the Vampire II accesses the motherboard / trapdoor chip memory?

You're just reading too much into this change. They are still very much dependent on the regular chip memory since all the custom chips needs DMA access to it (and they cannot have that if it is located inside the Vampire). Only when they have the entire Amiga implemented in the FPGA can they move away from the regular chip mem, but that is not going to happen soon. Now they have improved chip mem access speed to resolve some slow down issues, but there are probably still a few issues left seeing as it is hard to get 100% speed. You see similar problems with other accelerators like ACA500, ACA620 etc.