@eliyahu

Unbelievable! It's obviously a fake news site. Who would have thought he was 41? He looks mid thirties at most.

:p

Bill 'tekmage' Borsari

@tekmage

"Unbelievable! It's obviously a fake news site. Who would have thought he was 41? He looks mid thirties at most."



@thread
Why there should be a competition with Vampire?

I see the Vampire team part of the Amiga community and in the future a merge of the Vampire with NG Amiga.

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retired

Just a guess, but perhaps Matthew is just starting up another company to take over the management of the A-Eon software development/sales. It is not AmigaKit's core business, after all.

It's the sort of thing that businesses do from time to time, to keep track of things.

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tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@tonyw

Quote:

perhaps Matthew is just starting up another company to take over the management of the A-Eon software development/sales. It is not AmigaKit's core business, after all.

My thoughts exactly. AmigaKit is a computer reseller so perhaps Matthew wanted to put their SW/HW development activities under a separate business entity. No need for wild speculations, although it'll be interesting to see if the new company incorporates A-EON. Would make good sense. But then again, they'd have to rebrand all the boards

@Kremlar
Quote:

Anything that makes Classic users happy with Classic hardware/software (like the Vampire) is clearly a threat to NG Amiga growth.

I've heard this popular chorus before but I just don't see it this way. AmigaKit's + A-EON's Amiga Developer project (of which the Enhancer Software pack is the first tangible product) is equally dedicated to supporting OS4 and OS3. Surely A-EON wouldn't shot their NG hardware sales in the foot this way if they thought supporting OS3 was a threat?

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AmigaOne X5000/020 @ 2GHz / 4GB RAM / Radeon RX 560 / ESI Juli@ / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@Trixie

Quote:

I've heard this popular chorus before but I just don't see it this way. AmigaKit's + A-EON's Amiga Developer project (of which the Enhancer Software pack is the first tangible product) is equally dedicated to supporting OS4 and OS3. Surely A-EON wouldn't shot their NG hardware sales in the foot this way if they thought supporting OS3 was a threat?

Who knows how everyone else sees things, but I see major Classic development like the Vampire as a threat to NG growth.

That being said, people and comapnies don't always act like you might expect them. I see Macs as a threat to Windows market share (who doesn't?), yet Microsoft develops software for the Mac.

Last edited by Kremlar on 26-Apr-2017 at 11:15 AM.

@Kremlar

Yeah, really.

Because Amiga fanatics ain't the most stable mofos I've ever met.

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The amount of progress the Vampire project has made in such a short time...

Vampire V2-128 IS a neat development. And the constant development of updated hardware has finally helped push the development of better cores.

Frankly, I'd begun to really question Gunnar's abilities.

The BS surrounding the entire Natami project really got overwhelming, and the Vampire project seems to get bogged down occasionally by the same feature creep problems that affected that endeavor.

Like...why create new multimedia instructions/extensions BEFORE the fpu is finished?

So..."in such a short time"?

Really? On the hardware side, yeah I can see that. But in general, especially if you look at the entire FPGA Amiga community in general, the entire thing is typical Amiga community ssslllooowww.


@Kremlar

Quote:

Who knows how everyone else sees things, but I see major Classic development like the Vampire as a threat to NG growth.

I don't, but I'm probably atypical in that I'm not as Balkanised as most people.
Are Mac and PCs a threat to each other? How can they be, aren't they pretty much the same thing (I have both, and they are REALLY hard to tell apart).

And I'd buy a Vampire. I still own legacy hardware, it doesn't prevent me from owning and using my NG systems.

Why would any of this preclude the use of something else?

Last edited by iggy on 26-Apr-2017 at 11:39 AM.

@iggy

Quote:

Really? On the hardware side, yeah I can see that. But in general, especially if you look at the entire FPGA Amiga community in general, the entire thing is typical Amiga community ssslllooowww.

FPGA Arcade has been very slow, but that is a single man operation doing hardware, firmware, core development, etc., and he seems to have an extremely full life - so is it much of a surprise?

I've been following Vampire core development and that seems to be moving forward very quickly. I understand some are anxious for an FPU and MMU but clearly that is not their priority.


Quote:

Like...why create new multimedia instructions/extensions BEFORE the fpu is finished?

Apparently because that's what they wanted to complete first? With semi-hobby projects like these you have to keep it fun for the developers otherwise they have little or no incentive to keep the project going.


Quote:

Are Mac and PCs a threat to each other? How can they be, aren't they pretty much the same thing (I have both, and they are REALLY hard to tell apart).

They are competition to one another. You may own both, but most people are either Mac-centric or Windows-centric and choose one over another. Clearly the existence of Windows is a hindrance to the growth of the Mac user base and vice versa. If only 1 existed the other would have a larger installed base.


Quote:

And I'd buy a Vampire. I still own legacy hardware, it doesn't prevent me from owning and using my NG systems. Why would any of this preclude the use of something else?

Because people only have so much money to spend and tend to have loyalties to one product vs. another. I consider myself a Classic user and have yet to be able to justify the cost of a NG system. Is the Tabor interesting to me? Slightly, but the Vampire is more interesting - especially the future standalone board. I likely will not buy both, and the existence of Vampire makes me lean towards that.

Everyone is clearly different, clearly, but I am an example of someone who may not go NG if Classic development continues at the current pace. There are others who feel the same, clearly this hinders NG growth at least somewhat.

@Kremlar

Quote:

I am an example of someone who may not go NG if Classic development continues at the current pace. There are others who feel the same, clearly this hinders NG growth at least somewhat.

But why do they need to be mutually exclusive?

Accelerated 68k-based systems (or "reimplementations") should be more than capable of running a version of 4.x if the market demand exists.

Whether Hyperion chooses to explore that opportunity is another story.

@Kremlar

I think Vampire might bridge the classic Amiga with AmigaONE, a bit.

One big show stopper for AmigaOS4 users, is classic software that is not written to opens a intuition screen mode's other then AGA or OCS 320x200/640x200, now classic users are going to get larger screens modes in true colors. So I hope developers will use and support this new screen modes, and in so doing I think more software will be compatible with AmigaOS4.

What classic Amiga lacks is 16bit/32bit/float audio support, if only more classic users owned a quality sound card. If AHI was installed by default. Another show stopper is that developers who write programs and games for classic Amiga, do not support USB gamepads/joystick, but instead poke the joy0 and joy1 hardware addresses.

Anyway, better hardware for classic users should help AmigaOS4 users. It's not like Vimpire is blazing fast or anything that’s not its strength, Vampires strength is that it's more compatible with Amiga then AmigaONE is.

I like to see better software for Classic Amiga with full AHI, RTG, USB support, they are working on RTG, the USB and AHI part needs work.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 26-Apr-2017 at 04:37 PM.
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@ne_one

Quote:

But why do they need to be mutually exclusive?

I don't think it NEEDS to be, just that in many or most cases it seems to be.


Quote:

Accelerated 68k-based systems (or "reimplementations") should be more than capable of running a version of 4.x if the market demand exists. Whether Hyperion chooses to explore that opportunity is another story.

I think it would be awesome to see the 68K OS developed further, but not sure if Hyperion is the company I'd want behind that. I would imagine they'd sell a lot more than they do currently, tied to expensive hardware.

I'd love to see OS sales figures and how Hyperion manages to stay in business. I also wonder how sales of their Classic PPC version compares to the normal version.

@NutsAboutAmiga

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I think Vampire might bridge the classic Amiga with AmigaONE, a bit.

One would hope!


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It's not like Vimpire is blazing fast or anything that’s not its strength, Vampires strength is that it's more compatible with Amiga then AmigaONE is.

I agree that Vampire brings a lot of features to the table and speed is just one of them, and I know benchmarks can be deceiving, but from what I've read and the videos I've seen performance does seem to be great compared to other 68K processors - do you not agree? I know it's not 10x faster than a 68060 or anything, but it does seem like a substantial jump in many cases to me.

@Kremlar

Quote:

I'd love to see OS sales figures and how Hyperion manages to stay in business.

Must be sheer stubborn persistence. Because vending an OS for a few hundred users can't be profitable.
I would imagine, with emulation support, that the OS4 Classic version has actually sold a fair number of copies.

So, IF they were to broaden their pursuit of the legacy market, they might actually see an upswing in their sales.

@iggy

Quote:

Must be sheer stubborn persistence. Because vending an OS for a few hundred users can't be profitable. I would imagine, with emulation support, that the OS4 Classic version has actually sold a fair number of copies. So, IF they were to broaden their pursuit of the legacy market, they might actually see an upswing in their sales.

I agree with all of the above!

Anyway, sorry for taking this off topic.

I do find the creation of "Amiga Technology, Ltd." interesting and am eager to see how this all plays out. It like a soap opera!

@Kremlar

Quote:

I agree that Vampire brings a lot of features to the table and speed is just one of them, and I know benchmarks can be deceiving, but from what I've read and the videos I've seen performance does seem to be great compared to other 68K processors - do you not agree? I know it's not 10x faster than a 68060 or anything, but it does seem like a substantial jump in many cases to me.

Sure, It's faster in many ways then an original Amiga1200/4000, just because you faster ram, faster screen modes, and so on, improvements here and there, all adds up. They have managed to fix a few this nasty bottlenecks I believe faster chip ram and so on.

I won't say a lot of feature, and I'm not sure if many of features they have promoted are that great, I mean video overlay support is pretty dated technology, the videos they have shown on it has been pretty low res. At least compared to videos I play on my X1000, now days 3d graphic cards take over for overlay, I also found strange that did their own SIMD instruction set, I think be good idea base it on some existing standard. So you won't need to rewrite all optimized codecs from AVX-512 or AltiVec or VMX3, I mean be huge amount of work to keep the codecs up to date, having to rewrite it for Vampire/AMMX.

The lack of FPU is problem; at least if you're porting Linux programs to AmigaOS, FPU is important if you're doing a lot of precision calculations, geometry 3d games for example. It's on the road map so I won't worry about it.

If your wont to play back video film, you should also probably have good disk access, the vampire is bit lacking here I think, I mean it does not have SATA2 controller, so no way to connect SSD disks.

I also think the lack of USB is issue, if you like to import your images from camera, I mean USB pretty much a standard this-days, it seems strange not have it a modern computer system.

I guess we have to see what becomes of the standalone version of vampire, we have to hope it becomes a more complete package.

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The AMMX instructions are probably a better fit to the rest of the 68080 Apollo core design than using some other existing SIMD instruction set would be my guess.

I suspect the FPU isn't the highest priority currently as other things are essential for the standalone version of the Vampire to become a reality.

When it comes to disk access speed BigGun has said Quote:

Regarding faster IO. The Vampire IDE right now does reach 11-14 MB/sec. This is very good for an AMIGA. The limit is not the SAGA IDE hardware. Our IDE interface can actually reach a lot more. We could reach about twice as fast IDE speed. The main bottleneck is today the software of the SCSI.device in Kickstart. So you do not even need a hardware upgrade - all you need is someone slightly improving the Kickstart SCSI.device and then you can get over 20 MB/sec IDE speed.

The standalone is expected to include USB.

@Kremlar

Quote:

Who knows how everyone else sees things, but I see major Classic development like the Vampire as a threat to NG growth.

But why do you see it as a threat?
The two things can easily coexist and would only support each other. You know: "united we stand, divided we fall"

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@iggy

Quote:

Must be sheer stubborn persistence. Because vending an OS for a few hundred users can't be profitable. I would imagine, with emulation support, that the OS4 Classic version has actually sold a fair number of copies. So, IF they were to broaden their pursuit of the legacy market, they might actually see an upswing in their sales.

Do they really have much overhead? It seems like they primarily operate as a subcontractor rather than as an OS developer.

And as far as OS 4.x is concerned, is much of the OS PPC-specific? The demand in non-traditional markets (UAE, Vampire etc.) may very well eclipse that of PPC-based systems.

@ne_one

Quote:

Do they really have much overhead? It seems like they primarily operate as a subcontractor rather than as an OS developer.

Sub-contrator, or contractor? Who do they sub-contract out to? A-EON?

That's possible. A-EON funds the OS development to support their hardware by paying Hyperion, Hyperion earns additional revenue through separate OS sales, Hyperion pays the programmers to work on the OS. Or are most of the programmers volunteer?

@Am!ga

Welcome!

@ne_one

Quote:

And as far as OS 4.x is concerned, is much of the OS PPC-specific?

Probably not. The C code probably just requires some more horsepower than the code the legacy software was built on.
It ought to be possible to back port it to something more capable like the Vampire OR to something X64 based.