@outrun1978

You should also remind people of your blog;

https://amigax5000.blog/

And direct Goldfish towards Epsilons blog too for additional information;

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com/

Epsilon got tons of legacy information too in blogform, but not much Vampire as I can recall. Vampire related info can be gleaned from a multitude of youtube videos that keeps popping up regulary.

@outrun1978

if his requirements is to play mp3/videos in HD then Tabor is no choice either because it is embedded hardware class either. I do not badmouth 4.X either because I do not own it (except the classic version).

In my view the thread title is wrong anyway, there is no race between Tabor and Vampire/Apollo because both platforms are very different. The only exception is people who are interested in both but have only money for one. Should standalone hardware be ready before Tabor I assume that it hurts sales. But we will see.

BTW I exactly said that the choice depends on interests, if you can afford it and have interest nobody is stopping anybody to buy both

Last edited by OlafS25 on 04-Aug-2017 at 03:38 PM.

@OlafS25

Quote:

if it keeps the order then 2019

Noooooo! My monthly supply of chocolate depends on 2017 release!

@OlafS25

if performance off a Sam460 is anything to do a base on (and there are indications that the A1222 will surpass this board easily in terms of performance,) on a Sam you can play full screen in Emotion a 360p video in SD. It will cope with 480p and yes it will struggle with 720p or anything higher, but that is not to say it wont struggle on the A1222. In reality until someone who is from the Beta Tester Team or ends up owning the board actually does some videos or tests none of us really know, all there is speculation.


And yes you are right to a large extent I think the platforms for the two products are quite different, although Vampire from what i am lead to believe will not give the user the opportunity to run OS4 if they wanted to, An A1222 however will give that user the OS4 experience and also access to the classic abeit in an emulated environment.

@overflow

Thanks for the plug. btw I have updated yesterday with a piece on the FPSE Sony Playstation emulator.

and yes Epsilon's blog posts are a fountain of knowledge for those who are curious across all platforms

_________________
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Amiga 1200 Workbench 3.1.4
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@outrun1978

Quote:

any sane person would agree

And you're looking for sane responses on an Amiga site?
You must be one of those damned optimists I keep running into here.

Look, I'm probably going to end up with an NG system very similar to yours, but I wouldn't try to sell that to others as an ideal system to run legacy software on.
And this entire thread is disingenuous, PPC NG systems and Vampie equipped legacy systems aren't comparable.
Its an apples and oranges comparison.

With direct support for register level hardware compatibility, Vampire has a clear advantage running legacy software, especially software that hits hardware directly.

That being said, a Vampire equipped legacy system or a stand alone Vampire board would still make a really poor general purpose computer.

You want to run anything even vaguely modern? You need a PPC or X64 based system, its just a fact. You can't 'supercharge' a 68K compatible and somehow miraculously make it comparable.
Anyone that sells this idea is doing a disservice to those that might make a buying decision based on this misinformation.

BUT, again, you want to run legacy software? Even with my complaints about fpu and mmu functions...Vampire wins hands down.

@ferrels

Quote:

The A1222 was announced in October 2015 and the hardware exists but it isn't being sold because its oddball math co-processor is incompatible with OS4 software.

Hah hah hah, so funny :p

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@ferrels

Quote:

I'm not counting the Natami. I'm counting the Vampires V1 thru V3. The Natami was never a product because one of the team members refused to allow its release.

Well, the people behind Apollo Core sees this differently.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@iggy

Quote:

What should worry ALL PPC NG users is that our PCIe v1, v1.1, and v2.0 expansion slots may not support future video cards. I've already received confirmation from AMD that older slots support GCN gen 1 cards, BUT will probably have a problem with later cards. SO, are we at a dead end here?

Where did AMD say that? And did they give a reason?

PCIe v3 is backward compatible to PCIe v1 slots, and PCIe v4 is supposed to be backward compatible too. The Radeon R7 240 has a PCIe v3 interface despite being a GCN1 card. It works just fine in my A1-X1000 (which has v1.1 PCIe, IIRC), so the older PCIe standard shouldn't be a barrier.

If there is something that would cause trouble, then I'd really like to know.

@all
Back on topic. It'll be interesting to see whether the Vampire 4 or A1222 is available for sale first. I personally think the A1222 will still get there first.

I saw a Vampire board at AmiWest last year. Definitely impressive. I'll still be sticking with the A1222 though, because I'm much more interested in AmigaOS 4.x than the classic hardware and OS 3.x.

Hans

Last edited by Hans on 05-Aug-2017 at 12:05 AM.

_________________
http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Hans

Hey Hans,

Here's the first response:

"I believe that the HD7000 series GCN1 GPUs should work with the older PCI-E 2.0 revision Motherboards, however you may encounter issues if you attempt to use anything newer as we have had reports from customers that had compatibility issues when using the new RX400 and 500 series with PCI-E 2.0 motherboards."

I just checked my emails, and they updated their response with this when I followed up the initial inquiry with a restatement about the idea of using GCN gen 1 cards with v1 slots.

"In theory it should work, but i cannot guarantee it due to the age, sometimes odd compatibility issues can exist on such old hardware when mixed with newer hardware."

So, no guarantees that GCN gen1 will work with PCI-E v1 or v1.1, but that they definitely work with v2.
But we know from experience that gen1 cards work in the v1.1 slots of the SAM460 and will apparently work in the v1 slot of the A1222.
Further, that would appear to be good news for owners of PowerMac G5s (v1 again), which no one is using GCN cards in yet (although I have now exchanged messages with Spectre660 on the idea).

BUT, if I'm not mistaken, that's a qualifier in the first statement "...we have had reports from customers that had compatibility issues when using the new RX400 and 500 series cards with PCI-E 2.0 motherboards".

To be specific, my inquiry did mention that the drivers use AtomBIOS calls, so the shift to UEFI should not be considered a potential problem, and that I was posing a question based solely on the hardware compatibility of earlier PCI-E slots.

Could they still be throwing in these conditionals based on conventional PC use? I'd say its likely.
But it looks like we are just going to have to experiment/try the hardware out to get a complete picture of where this is going.

In any case, we can assume GCN gen1 is not going to be an issue.
Later generations...that is more questionable.
And the RX series? They are apparently not going to assure us that they will work in older slots.

Maybe they will...then again, maybe they won't.

In any case, I'm holding off buying RX series cards for MorphOS developer Mark Olsen until he lets me know later GCN cards are working.
He did say he installed a Radeon R7 260X (which is GCN gen2) and polled it via the PCI-E bus and got back information.
So the generations immediately after gen 1 look plausible.

I know that summing it up this way seems a little lame, but I think we're on our own here and will just have to experiment.
Until recently, I'd assumed that the G5's couldn't support GCN cards.
But the SAM460 is only v1.1, and the A1222 is apparently PCI-E v1 (yeah, its actually an earlier standard), and both apparently support GCN gen1 cards, so it ought to be possible in the G5 as well.

Gen2? Folks like you and Mark will have to figure that out, I'm just a hacker.
I've now got my hands full just trying to figure out GCN gen1 installation on the G5 (with thanks to Spectre660 for the first clues on what's needed to get that rolling).

So...just a heads up, our hardware is a little 'non-standard' (to say the least), and the road ahead could be a little 'rocky'.

Last edited by iggy on 05-Aug-2017 at 01:37 AM.

@iggy

Okay, so they're really saying that they can't guarantee operation with older hardware, even though it theoretically should work. Fair enough, given that they're not targeting older hardware and there's so much hardware out there that at least a few will have PCIe interfaces that aren't quite 100% compliant (hey, AMD themselves released graphics cards that initially drew more power than the PCIe spec allowed).

UEFI is a pure software issue which, and I've seen some hints of UEFI support for U-Boot. So that's something that could be overcome.

Hans

_________________
http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@g01df1sh

Quote:

Why don't you apply to Aeon / Hyperion to write the drivers as you seem to think it is so easy. Neither machine is available yet that's why I said race. A1222 is predicted to be out by Christmas much the same as the Vampire and both will most likely serve my requirements ok. Requirements Play old games Play MP3 / Video Email Internet Not to demanding....

OK, so which is it? Some folks in this thread are claiming that 1000 Tabor's were produced and just sitting in an A-EON warehouse waiting for drivers and you're claiming they don't exist at all. You seem to have a problem with facts that entails just making up your own facts when it suits you.

OS4 is a complete dead end, as is the PPC. I have no interest in developing for OS4 whatsoever. I'll be developing for AROS x86_64 once the network stack is fixed and dabbling a bit with classic development once I have a standalone Vampire in my possession.

Again, what race? Vampires have been available for sale and people have been using them for quite some time. You can't say that about the Tabor...period. The V4 is an incremental upgrade over existing Vampires. Does the Tabor have any such successor? No, because it hasn't even made its first release.

Last edited by ferrels on 05-Aug-2017 at 03:57 AM.

@Hans

>Quote:
>I saw a Vampire board at AmiWest last year. Definitely impressive. I'll still be sticking with the >A1222 though, because I'm much more interested in AmigaOS 4.x than the classic hardware and >OS 3.x.
>
>Hans

Vampire is great, I had several, and imho the missing fpu is not even the baddest. You really need knowledge and experience to install the classic Amiga os, at least without a CD-Rom attached to the A600 or a PCMCIA ethernet card. Offcourse it can be done but it is not that easy as booting from the OS4.1 CD on Cyberstorm- or BlizzardPPC machines.

Last edited by bennymee on 05-Aug-2017 at 08:35 AM.

@bennymee

With the ApolloOS ISO, those headaches are all gone

@Overflow

Quote:

With the ApolloOS ISO, those headaches are all gone

Well, not for lawful people among us.

@pavlor

I tried to exctrat it to my Windows machine's hard drive. Didn't succeed and I don't have 32mb sd card to test it. Wanted to see is there anything reletively new pirated software.

Last edited by utri007 on 05-Aug-2017 at 10:49 AM.

@Hans

Quote:

I've seen some hints of UEFI support for U-Boot

It would be useful for boot prompts, but not essential.
And yeah, I think they're just adding the qualifier to limit the headaches they have with support.
As in "it probably will work, but if it doesn't that's on you".

And its not like we get get support for our community from them anyway, eh?

Hey, they barely support Linux (usually badly).

@ferrels

Obviously the A1222 exists, and even if there aren't 1000 of them sitting on a shelf somewhere, something tells me Aeon purchased about 1000 P1022 cpus (which makes them inevitable).

Are they a good idea? I'd agree with you there, flatly, no.

And support for PowerPC has been dwindling for years, with only later versions of the Power ISA being actively developed (and those are just too freakin' expensive for the desktop).

Current PPC NG software needs to transition to a new ISA, and since Power8/9 doesn't seem practical, you're probably right that X64 is the only real alternative.

At least the developers of the NG OS I'm using seem to agree with you.

And in that regard I'm willing to defer to the professionals (yourself included).

So I'll over spend on my last PPC hardware, but I'm not downgrading into this mess.

And as I still use retro hardware for the pure fun factor, vampire does make sense to me.

Last edited by Beans on 05-Aug-2017 at 12:14 PM.

_________________
Amiga! "Our appeal has become more selective"

@ferrels

Quote:

ome folks in this thread are claiming that 1000 Tabor's were produced

Not claiming but repeating what Trevor himself said. Are you saying Trevor is was being dishonest?

Quote:

OS4 is a complete dead end, as is the PPC. I have no interest in developing for OS4 whatsoever.

Bye then.

@ferrels

Of please, the nihilism levels are over 9000 here.
Remember that time when ARM was as good as dead? No? My point.

@Beans

The ISA can be seem as a problem now, but given the current rate of development, sticking to PPC is perfectly fine. The ISA isn't as dead as many would want you to believe.

@iggy


Quote:

but I wouldn't try to sell that to others as an ideal system to run legacy software on.

Actually I advised that getting an A1222 would be a good way of getting both worlds classic and OS4/NG, but equally why should't we be encouraging OS4 or MorphOS as a way of running your classic software even if it is via emulation? Plenty of people already run legacy software via emulation using WinUAE or FS-UAE on other platform. Several posters on here only use emulation because its all they can afford. I think people need to get away from the negative connotations associated with emulation, it has its uses and when works well the casual user can't really tell the difference, its only the hardcore lot that pick up on the little things.

Fyi....the emulation of the classic side of things performs quite well on the X5000 once the settings are correctly set up and for the vast majority of casual users who want to play games that will probably suffice.

I can't fully comment on the productivity side of things under emulation as i tend to use my machines primarily for games, over in Europe as I am sure you are aware, the Amiga scene was far more games orientated than productivity wise as it was in the States, but equally quite a lot of the productivity side of things run in OS4 without the need for E-UAE.

At the end of the day If i can't run something in OS4 either natively or via E-UAE i have my A1200 to fall back on for classic software, but the fact that my A1200 hasn't been touched in the 3 years I have now owned an NG machine which should tell you something on how well things do actually run emulation or not.

_________________
Amigaone X5000/20 4GB Radeon RX 550 Polaris 12 AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition Update 1
Amiga 1200 Workbench 3.1.4
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