June Activity Report has landed for everyone interested in what’s going on with the 68080 FPGA accelerators for classic Amiga and the new standalone Vampire V4 card. It’s been exciting weeks lately in the Apollo Team for sure and here is some words regarding the steps been made.
Summer will for sure be hot in the 68080 FPGA Amiga community. Sit down, get som some nice drinks, relax and enjoy a glass of blood which the team recommends. Here is the Vampire V4 topics to cover for until now. Let’s begin…
Vampire V4 bugs found and Destroyed for a Great Amiga Future
Back in April, Amitopia made an article and test about how long uptime a Vampirized Amiga will last. For over 14 days, our Amiga 500 test machine was on without any issues. But when developing new hardware, you need to locate the bugs. On the night 2nd of June, Apollo Team finally found the reason and fixed the biggest problem, Renaud Schweingruber writes in the report.
Some team members were during that particular evening attending the OufParty 5 in Martigny (Switzerland). When they got the information, they instantly left the dinnertable, leaving creamy raclette and fresh white wine alone to teleport themself in front of their Vampire V4 developer boards to test that freshly baked core : for the first time ever since Neuss, the Vampire V4 worked perfectly on every Amiga 500 mainboard tested. I won’t comment what came next, mostly because I’m missing part of it and because it was mainly made from alcohol and cigars (which might explain why I’m missing those parts).
Either you have bug reports or issues related to anything. When a solution comes up. Fix it straight away. That is a great way of moving project forward. Excellent to see progress!
Testers in the team will soon see Vampire V4 cards
The Apollo Team’s next step is now to send Vampire V4 cards to all testers in team. So the team can move on and finalising the product before releasing it on the market.
All this means that things from now on will progress faster. However, Vampire V4 cards will see the light out of the tunnel soon. The team is working hard for delivering you a new product that anyone can be proud of.
68080 FPGA Software side is also Moving on
Even though it is summer, the developers is making sure that FPGA Vampire is getting upgrades that they need to function even better. Here is some great notes regarding that:
- – Bax is working as always as a shaolin monk on the driver side. New SDNet and ExpNetV2 should bring new features like multicasting/SANA-II (letting you use network within ShapeShifter), while improving performance and reliability.
- – Nonarkitten is working on GnGeo and is squeezing every single FPS she can out from it
- – Inflammasome is working on improving his STonAmiga software
Interesting notes here is the fact that you will be able to use network functions within ShapeShifter Mac emulator for AmigaOS. With 68080 being the fastest classic macos machine also. Its a nice development progress update for sure.
GnGeo and STonAmiga is also getting improvements. When these gets full sound support. Now that will be Awesome. Vampirized Amiga’s will become the ultimate Arcade hardware for sure.
AGA Gold3 for all 68080 FPGA cards is Still going to be released This Summer
Gunnar, which is also known as BigGun on IRC is still working for a summer release of the next core update for the FPGA’s. You can read all of his answers about Gold3 in our article where we have interviewed Gunnar here.
He have announced that Gold3 for Vampire cards will be available this summer. The Apollo Team are all pretty confident that the AGA support will be really super and every day core is being improved with new fixes to let us play more and more games as it should have been done by Commodore many years ago.
OCS and ECS Amiga users will get a Fantastic Gold3 update
Describing the feeling when an AGA game runs perfectly on an OCS/ECS Amiga is a out of this world experience. Also when it will work fine by connecting the Vampire 68080 Amiga to a HDMI TV this feeling will be xtravaganza for sure.
The time is soon over. The summer in Europe lasts until August 31st. So, if Gold3 is released before that time. It will really amazing for sure.
Read the entire Apollo Team announcement on their site here. Exiting times for Amigans!
Source: Apollo Team
