Sold Vampire 1200 V2 rev: 1.3 - 5 cards #3

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So in other words, YOU don't need and YOU won't let others get more RAM for whatever THEY want to use. Sorry for asking.
It’s not like if you had not the choice, right ??
Just buy the card you find better for your need and fill up the X GB with all the craps you want.
Easy…

Your post sound a bit strange…. Especially with the words in capital…. 🤷🏻‍♂️ GB frustration maybe , 😀 Sorry if I misunderstood…..
 
Adding more memory is easy task but so far I had no idea what would be used for on Amiga. Maybe it is just me but I have never needed more than 64MB. 10 years ago I have experimented with adding more than ~2GB to my Amiga (if I remember correctly what was the size I added) but that was only test and practically showoff. You know in the old days when you invite your friends to see your computer have more memory than theirs :) But as said, frankly I had no idea what is the purpose of this. People say OK for the making music. I was music producer and made lot of work in electronic music using various trackers so I know thing or two about samples used there, their formats and sizes. Also my view on new Amiga games ports and their hardware requirements is maybe different than others has but I want to say. First I don't want to play PC games on Amiga. I don't want to have Amiga for the purpose of playing PC or Android or whatever game or program port or clone. Frankly I don't even understand efforts and energy companies making for such ports. OK being able to start quake or doom or whatever on Amiga is proof of concept, it is cool but really will I play it all day on Amiga or I will play Superfrog. I really don't want to start debate here but what we are doing if we are pushing Amiga towards PC or modern mobile phone. At the end Amiga will become nothing more than power supply units with only 5V used from the motherboard. With Vampire cards we did add several "modern" hardware stuff but all of them just support old Amiga concepts and nothing else, all of them ticking with Amiga chipset and every single part of Amiga is still in use and that was the idea from the start. Maybe I am completely wrong here regarding memory size and I apologize if I said something wrong but I would really like to hear differently.

Regarding expansion slot, it is not implemented but maybe with future cores we can find some purpose for it. It would be nice to make it operational and maybe some proposals here from the users would be great. What would people like to have there? What's missing?
Regarding 256MB
IMHO it is really nice to be able to play classic amiga games, but it is also very nice to have the option to start one of the new 68k ports on the amiga, so more RAM is helping.
I also read somewhere that for compiling larger software one need to switch to UAE, becuase 128MB might be to little.

Regarding Expansion Slot:
Is it the same slot where the network card can be added?
 
It’s not like if you had not the choice, right ??
Just buy the card you find better for your need and fill up the X GB with all the craps you want.
Easy…

Your post sound a bit strange…. Especially with the words in capital…. 🤷🏻‍♂️ GB frustration maybe , 😀 Sorry if I misunderstood…..
There is no choice as the V2 is only available with 128 MB. but 256 MB would be better as I run sometimes out of memory.

of course not for Superfrog but I don't need a Vampire to play Superfrog. there are many reasons but the designer blocks by default with silly reasons. I mean we are living in 2024 not 1994 and even if someone wants to play stupid PC Ports - why not?

and no one was asking for GB of RAM!

(Maybe adding smileys here and there but also depends on how people read the letters.)
 
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neocdtv

This what you are saying makes sense when we are talking about compiling on Amiga equipped with Vampire card and this is valid reason why someone would need more memory.

IAmAddicted

Let me elaborate some more about memory size we have here. At first Vampire cards had 64MB of memory but for the benefits of CPU "speedup" we increased it to 128MB so memory size was not added because its size but because other reasons. Since we used SDR SDRAM chip I have tried to find largest one possible and that was 512Mbit chip in TSSOP package. Complete prototyping was complex and took several years and simply I couldn't afford to go with BGA chip on that side too because I was soldering 484 pins of FPGA BGA chip already and to minimize potential mistakes there had to be sacrifices. Just to mention SDR SDRAM chip was never build in 64X16 or 1Gb size. Because technical advance it was replaced by DDR at the time. So main question here is why I used SDR SDRAM at all. Because we used Cyclone III FPGA who didn't have integrated DDR memory controller like it was in Cyclone V. But then again why we didn't use Cyclone V instead. Because Altera, now Intel decided to drop Megafunction ALTPLL and started new approach with ALTERAPLL who created tons of problems for us with interfacing to Amiga bus, we were never able to get it right for years. So in one hand we had FPGA capable of having tons of memory basically for free because with integrated DDR controller you save lot of LE but we had problems with introducing amiga clock and in fact complete Amiga bus to it. On other side we had FPGA who can do all but with different memory. Option was to be stuck for years with something like Cyclone V and probably give up eventually or actually do something instead having our concept in theory and publish Vampire V2 with the design we have now.

Worst of everything was that I did it all but it was dropped as an idea and look at the date when this prototype is build :) And look for the complexity of interface of DDR I have done back then. This was never published before. With this design done 9 years ago you could add any FPGA with 484 FBGA package (because I did on paper pin migration) and any memory size.
 

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any news? thanks

Mitch
Yes, week ago I got stickers and core is already up on my website supporting new cards but I didn't find any free time to publish sale here. Few cards are already sold over my website but I will have some left for sale here on amibay. Hopefully by the end of this week small batch of cards for sale will be published here. Tnx for interest :)
 
Regarding 256MB
IMHO it is really nice to be able to play classic amiga games, but it is also very nice to have the option to start one of the new 68k ports on the amiga, so more RAM is helping.
I also read somewhere that for compiling larger software one need to switch to UAE, becuase 128MB might be to little.

Regarding Expansion Slot:
Is it the same slot where the network card can be added?
Comming back to Expansion Slot:
I guess most useful would be a usb controller. Would be both i.e. ethernet and usb at the same time possible or would they exclude each other because there is one expansion slot?

Regarding improvments:
I was planning in the past to run the V2 with Elbox Zorro2/4 Busboard. Sadly it didn't work.I also have read contradicting info some users say it works some that it doesnt.
Even better would be Mediator support, but with the missing mmu, I would assume that only 8MB from the PCI address space would be visible, but I would also be pretty happy with a 8MB VideoRam Voodoo3, which would support of course Warp3D.
 
Slots are not excluding each others and they are completely separately integrated.

2 years ago I have started to talk to Elbox regarding info I needed for the core, we had some progress but then we stopped talking. Let's say that only few people in our team was interested to develop such thing so I can't blame Elbox alone but my feeling was that they also wasn't excited about this idea too much. Several times before I was sending them mail to ask about tech details and how to implement mediator support in core but I didn't even get reply. Then we started to talk but at some point I felt like I was begging them to explain me several stuff. I don't know, I think that interest for this should be the same for both sides and after all in benefit for the users. Maybe I am wrong but I didn't felt like that. At some point if I remember we could detect mediator and cards on it but something was missing. Now, I don't have much influence in core development and my hands are tied on this topic but this is definitely possible and doable. I think with proper debug routine we could do it in a day, again if there is interest.
 

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Slots are not excluding each others and they are completely separately integrated.

2 years ago I have started to talk to Elbox regarding info I needed for the core, we had some progress but then we stopped talking. Let's say that only few people in our team was interested to develop such thing so I can't blame Elbox alone but my feeling was that they also wasn't excited about this idea too much. Several times before I was sending them mail to ask about tech details and how to implement mediator support in core but I didn't even get reply. Then we started to talk but at some point I felt like I was begging them to explain me several stuff. I don't know, I think that interest for this should be the same for both sides and after all in benefit for the users. Maybe I am wrong but I didn't felt like that. At some point if I remember we could detect mediator and cards on it but something was missing. Now, I don't have much influence in core development and my hands are tied on this topic but this is definitely possible and doable. I think with proper debug routine we could do it in a day, again if there is interest.
From what you say, there is very little chance to get Mediator Support.
 
Adding more memory is easy task but so far I had no idea what would be used for on Amiga. Maybe it is just me but I have never needed more than 64MB. 10 years ago I have experimented with adding more than ~2GB to my Amiga (if I remember correctly what was the size I added) but that was only test and practically showoff. You know in the old days when you invite your friends to see your computer have more memory than theirs :) But as said, frankly I had no idea what is the purpose of this. People say OK for the making music. I was music producer and made lot of work in electronic music using various trackers so I know thing or two about samples used there, their formats and sizes. Also my view on new Amiga games ports and their hardware requirements is maybe different than others has but I want to say. First I don't want to play PC games on Amiga. I don't want to have Amiga for the purpose of playing PC or Android or whatever game or program port or clone. Frankly I don't even understand efforts and energy companies making for such ports. OK being able to start quake or doom or whatever on Amiga is proof of concept, it is cool but really will I play it all day on Amiga or I will play Superfrog. I really don't want to start debate here but what we are doing if we are pushing Amiga towards PC or modern mobile phone. At the end Amiga will become nothing more than power supply units with only 5V used from the motherboard. With Vampire cards we did add several "modern" hardware stuff but all of them just support old Amiga concepts and nothing else, all of them ticking with Amiga chipset and every single part of Amiga is still in use and that was the idea from the start. Maybe I am completely wrong here regarding memory size and I apologize if I said something wrong but I would really like to hear differently.

Regarding expansion slot, it is not implemented but maybe with future cores we can find some purpose for it. It would be nice to make it operational and maybe some proposals here from the users would be great. What would people like to have there? What's missing?

I've always wished my Vampires (I have a V2 500 and a V1200) had hardware mp3 decode support like with a MHI driver. And also USB support with Poseidon stack. Other than that I'm quite happy with them.
 
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