@Kremlar

Nope, no meetups here.

@nikosidis
Like I was saying... The order batch quantity affects the price more than anything else.
I recently designed an aluminum valve cover spacer that sits between 2 gaskets to allow for more valve lift on the heads of my engine without hitting the valve cover when using after-market full roller rocker arms... They had to use CNC cutting to make them. I converted my .STL file to a .STEP file and got some quotes...
When I ordered a set of 2, I paid about $400+ ... They fit perfect and I needed another pair for my engine. I posted about others needing this as well and decided to order 15 sets (of 2) the price went down to $35 each ($70 for 2)...plus shipping from China.
So when I say this was a "developer release" it's because the order quantity must have been pretty low to hit such a price. There's nothing proprietary here other than the code in the flash card.
How many V2's were sold in total? You/they should have tried to order that much in total and hit a more mass-market price. I use the term 'mass-market' loosely here of course...

The V2 sales alone is why the sudden interest by Hyperion to get a piece of the OS π.

Last edited by Lou on 26-Sep-2019 at 09:05 PM.

@Lou

Quote:

I'm not sure why it should cost much more than the V2

Bigger and faster FPGA, more I/O chips and therefore a bigger and more expensive board.

Quote:

if ordered in sufficient quantity it could cost less.

I don't think they will have batch sizes above 600 units but even if they would sell as much as a RaspPi it would cost more.

Speculation on my part, but semi educated... Part of the reason they are at this price is that are going to be sold through resellers. The resellers will need to make a margin and have to deal with "issues".

If they launched this too cheaply they would leave no room for reseller margins/support/advertising/attending events. Plus if you were signed up to be a reseller and you've placed your orders for $xxxxxxxx worth of gear you would feel pretty undermined if Apollo team sold a load at $299 before you had your stock.

I was hoping they were going to be cheaper, but it is about where I expected. I bought an 030 card for my A1200 last year and that cost £230, my V2 was £350 so its not that much of stretch to the V4 price once you add in the extra components and retail margins.

@Flasheart

230 pounds for an'030?
Holy cow...you got robbed blindly.
My 40mhz '040 card cost me about 105 pounds, and that absolutely destroys an '030.


@thread

Why are people celebrating this as an open platform?
AROS sure, but vampire/apollo have been worse than hyperion and mos, etc. in terms of openness.

Its just another closed option where everyone relies on a few entities. Absolutely no different to the current situation.

Like it/dislike it/whatever, its not my point.
I just dont understand why people are cheering this on as open when its not, and it changes absolutely nothing.
Just another mob that amigans are under the thumb of.

Sure, AROS is open, but it always has been, so again, absolutely zero in the way of changes.

@fishy_fis

It was a brand new ACA1233n from Amigakit, I checked and it was actually a bit cheaper then I remembered at £209.99. Thats how much they cost new then and now you can't even get one (at least from Amigakit. All they have as the ACA1221EC which is just an 020 at £113.

It still puts the price of the V4 into perspective though, especially if you don't have an Amiga already.

@ thread
Yes it's expensive compared to modern stuff. You can buy an Xbox One X for loads less and it has loads more power, but that's not the point, it's not an Amiga. The choices are to pay a lot for really old unreliable original hardware and then try to speed that up or buy a V4. I would like a V4, but I can't justify the price at the moment, so I will choose not to get one for now. But if my A1200 blew up then I probably would.

@Flasheart

Quote:

but that's not the point, it's not an Amiga.

Duh - exactly what about the V4 is "an Amiga"?

If the V4 is an Amiga, then isn't also Minimig, the MiST, MiSTer, FleaFPGA, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64 and whetever else with FPGA running Amiga cores... all "an Amiga"?

Last edited by kolla on 27-Sep-2019 at 02:07 PM.

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@fishy_fis

Quote:

Why are people celebrating this as an open platform? AROS sure, but vampire/apollo have been worse than hyperion and mos, etc. in terms of openness.

Indeed. I never bothered with AROS on the Vampire, since it makes much more sense to run open source OS on open source hardware. So I run AROS/68k on the MiST and the MiSTer.

Btw - my Minimig is 10 years old these days...

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@kolla

Maybe it is but most probably it is a far better and compatible Draco type machine. A Vampire A1200 is probably what most Classic Amiga people would prefer as they can convince themselves that it is a modern accelerator rather than a FPGA leech of a system (or Vampire if you will) Plus you have the tactile nature of the Commodore/AT case and keyboard to con you into ignoring what it really is!

Last edited by BigD on 27-Sep-2019 at 01:30 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 27-Sep-2019 at 01:30 PM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

Quote:

It's the price point we were expecting for the Tabor so if the Tabor is further delayed people may just allocate their savings for this instead!

That's what I'm considering. I wanted to get the Tabor ever since it was announced in 2015, but as the years have gone by I've kind of lost interest. At least the V4 will soon be an actual thing you can buy.

On the other hand, my MIST already runs most classic Amiga software and games just fine so I'm struggling to find a viable use case for a Vampire Standalone. Spending $600 just to run AB3D II at a decent framerate on dedicated hardware doesn't seem like an entirely sensible decision. The MIST was also only €200 for a custom board and case and is a CE certified product. I'd imagine the Cyclone V in the Vampire to be slightly more expensive than the Cyclone III in the MIST, but €400 more?

@AdvancedFollower

Quote:

On the other hand, my MIST already runs most classic Amiga software and games just fine so I'm struggling to find a viable use case for a Vampire Standalone.

I've been wondering about that. It would be nice to see some benchmarks comparing the V4, MIST, and emulation on a RPi4.

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"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@kolla

What about it isn't, its more Amiga than an Xbox. But that's not what I was getting at, I'm not trying to prove wether its any more or less an Amiga than any of the other options you mention. Most of which are not available from an Amiga retailer..... Do you know what, I'm not even going to bother. You are operating on a higher level than me, from previous posts I can see which way this is going to go so I will give up now and close with....

My comment was just me trying to put forward suggestions as to why its priced like that. Everyone has their own opinions on what is and isn't Amiga and for different people it means different things and has been argued about many times before.

@all

Quote:

AdvancedFollower wrote: Spending $600 just to run AB3D II at a decent framerate on dedicated hardware doesn't seem like an entirely sensible decision. The MIST was also only €200 for a custom board and case and is a CE certified product. I'd imagine the Cyclone V in the Vampire to be slightly more expensive than the Cyclone III in the MIST, but €400 more?

^^^ THIS!

Stop paying the Amiga tax!

Last edited by Lou on 27-Sep-2019 at 07:05 PM.

@Overflow

I knew it would win against the Tabor for the top spot. And cheaper than a Tabor and X5000 combined. The Tabor still has a chance to undercut it when it comes out.

@bison

Quote:

I've been wondering about that. It would be nice to see some benchmarks comparing the V4, MIST, and emulation on a RPi4.

Well, the MIST only performs similarly to a ~30 MHz '030 or so, but that's obviously more than enough for most classic Amiga software you might want to run for nostalgic reasons. It also lacks an FPU. It's perfect for playing old 2D games however due to zero latency and native support for Amiga joysticks.

I only tried Amiga emulation on a Pi 3B+ (not 4), but it's around 250 MIPS where as Vampire V2 is just over 90 MIPS. V4 is supposed to be about 25% faster. so still probably under half the speed of a Pi 3B+. The problem for me with the Pi was latency and compatibility, although the emulation is constantly improving.

Numbers do become a bit pointless however, since I can just run WinUAE on my PC and get something equal to a ~3 GHz 68060... Compatibility and authenticity (booting straight into Workbench, no underlying host OS to update and worry about etc.) are more important to me.

Last edited by AdvancedFollower on 28-Sep-2019 at 10:28 PM.

@AdvancedFollower

Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to stick with emulation for the time being.

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"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

1920x1080x32 FullHD On V4

@Overflow

i dont know any thing about the vampire standalone. but what are the upgrade options. iff there are some even.. could be made like this, an vampire stand alone and then an upgrade in form of a dauther board were you simply put the vampire v4 one together with an vampire two card and then flash the rom. and then double up the cpu power and get an pci-e slot so atleast there are an option to get an nice gffx card if some one makes the driver.and maby posabilaty for more memmory and other stuf...

@retro

More memory and a gfx card ? The Vampire 4SA has 512MB ram and a AGA-chipset, SuperAGA and RTG output, 16bit sound, the fastest 68K cpu - that is more then most highend Amiga's!

The first generation of V4SA is not really targeted as a motherboard with PCIe and lots of slots.

@bennymee

Quote:

bennymee wrote: @retro More memory and a gfx card ? The Vampire 4SA has 512MB ram and a AGA-chipset, SuperAGA and RTG output, 16bit sound, the fastest 68K cpu - that is more then most highend Amiga's! The first generation of V4SA is not really targeted as a motherboard with PCIe and lots of slots.

If the USB was upgraded to 3.0 it could have been a hero...
https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Riser-Express-Adapter-Power/dp/B073RBP3V6/ref=sr_1_20?qid=1569946745&sr=8-20

@OlafS25

Quote:

Reshoot-R in a special Aros 68k version for vampire

What's special about this? I've read AROS can run native 68K binaries so they don't need a special AROS binary build there. That leaves the Vampire itself. I'm afraid a video doesn't really explain what's so special about. Would it break if running on only AGA?