Amiga Thread.

[Ian J]

So yeah this is happening now on my Amigas:

Do you take requests?

I'd be interested in seeing some native Amiga titles that could have used a speed boost, things like Links 386 golf, test drive, Wings (dogfight sections) etc

 

[TrashyMG]

Not my video, but Quake II is actually fairly playable in software mode (Native port). This video also shows off some other games as well.


Also noticed a PC-Task DOS emulator example earlier in the video playing the DOS version of Tombraider, poor performance but kind of impressive:

[

 

[Ian J]

Yes I've seen those.

Impressive seeing them on an Amiga but I played them all to death on PC when they came out & more recently on Pandora.

I'm more excited to see some original Amiga titles with a speed boost, but I don't think many games exist that use extra processing power, even the ones you'd think would get a boost seem to be frame locked (F1GP, Stunt Car Racer, Gunship 2000)

F1GP can be patched but even then only goes up to 25fps.

The title I keep seeing is Elite 2: Frontier, and that played fine on my 030 4000.

Making me question if I need a Vampire 2

 

[TrashyMG]

@Ian J Edit: Found all the games, except Gunship 2000 in these two videos:


Formula 1 GP and Frontier

 

[Hellfleck]

Making me question if I need a Vampire 2

need got nothing to do with that never rationalize a hobby

 

[Ian J]

Another Amiga wannabe based on emulation:

https://www.newamiga.com/

 

[pmprog]

Another Amiga wannabe based on emulation:

https://www.newamiga.com/

Hmm, what I like about this though is that you can use a 9 pin DSUB joystick or USB!

Though these basically say "Come back in four years":

The Amiga X is still in early development. In the following months we will be inviting the Amiga community to have their influence in everything from design decisions to beta testing

Everything? From design decisions?! You'd at least think they had a design

The name and logos are used to illustrate a potential fan based concept.

I see they're planning to launch on Kickstarter too.

Is there any news on the standalone Vampire?

 

[TrashyMG]

Is there any news on the standalone Vampire?

Well prototypes exist, the devs are shaking down the hardware. From what I gathered some core development is needed before green lighting production.

 

[pmprog]

Hehe, I was going to say something really dumb then - like "Why are there two VGA connectors?"

 

[levi]

There are certainly enough serial ports on there. No parallel port though, which is disappointing. After so many years as the way to connect printers and scanners and plotters and all sorts, it seems to have died a quite sudden death. Meanwhile motherboard still ship with RS-232 ports (although often just as clusters of 9/10 pins on IDC sockets as above, I think)

 

[TrashyMG]

There are certainly enough serial ports on there. No parallel port though, which is disappointing. After so many years as the way to connect printers and scanners and plotters and all sorts, it seems to have died a quite sudden death. Meanwhile motherboard still ship with RS-232 ports (although often just as clusters of 9/10 pins on IDC sockets as above, I think)

if you're talking about the two DB-9 ports on the vampire those are the standard Amiga Joystick/Mouse ports not RS232.

There will be likely USB eventually outside of just using it as an HID device, and hopefully with the aid of a USB driver and Poseidon USB stack, you'll likely be able to use a USB printers if need be, depending if they're generic post script capable. There likely will be SPI and perhaps GPIO with the three expansion ports on top. It's possible there may be some Parallel port expansion with some electronic wizardry.

 

[levi]

No, I'll admit I did think the two joystick ports were RS-232 initially, but then I read the board legends of J1 and J2 and the penny dropped. That still leaves four RS-232 ports as ,1" IDC headers, unless any of those are GPIO clusers to something JTAGgy. I'd kind of assume that row of unpopulated thru holes in .1" spacing either side of the PATA/IDE headers were the GPIO lines though.

You can easily get hold of USB to Parallel port adaptors, but they're reportedly a bit flakey under windows at least.

 

[TrashyMG]

That still leaves four RS-232 ports as ,1" IDC headers, unless any of those are GPIO clusers to something JTAGgy. I'd kind of assume that row of unpopulated thru holes in .1" spacing either side of the PATA/IDE headers were the GPIO lines though.

The lower right one I know is a JTAG programmer port, typically used with the Altera USB Blaster or clone programmers. The 3 on top are just labelled I/O expansion ports. The Vampire V500 V2+ has one of these and currently it's programmed up as an SPI interface. Until the latest core, that expansion port was not used at all. Now they have Ethernet via an off the shelf SPI to Ethernet adapter, plus they're working on utilizing other SPI devices. It's possible they may make it and RS232, those guys are pretty secretive until the roll out the feature.


The 0.1" rows on either side of the IDE is where they would typically populate pins for a 68000 Processor socket. They are using the same PCB for the V4 Accelerator card version that would be shoved into a classic Amiga, it's just populated differently for the stand-alone. Which also explains why there are holes in the PCB which are designed to clear capacitors that are typically on the A500/A2000.

http://forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1804

 

[levi]

Thanks for the info. Sounds like I shouldn't bank on anyone's old peripherals being usable with this board by default (other than joysticks) then.

I'm slightly surprised about the inclusion of PATA sockets, given drives for those are starting to get to be a little hard to get hold of, with SATA drives being more common and certainly cheaper. The A4000 apparently used PATA/IDE hard discs (earlier HD-equipped models had SCSI drives) though, and provided that hasn't experienced a head crash or anything, might still be running and able to bring from those models.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well the A600 and A1200 had IDE out of the box as well. From what I understand it's easy to implement IDE, implementing SATA would require additional hardware and or software.

Most commonly people pick up cheap IDE to CF adapters, it seems many believe IDE to SD card adapters tend to be a slower. I attempted to use an IDE to SATA adapter, but It wasn't stable, could be because it cost me $7 and shipped from China.

 

[Ian J]

You can easily get hold of USB to Parallel port adaptors, but they're reportedly a bit flakey under windows at least.

+1

I have one for an old laser printer I used on the Amiga (LaserJet 6P) the USB to Parallel lead can be a pain to setup but once working runs fine, just the odd page of garbage gets printed if I turn the printer on before the PC.

 

[levi]

Most commonly people pick up cheap IDE to CF adapters, it seems many believe IDE to SD card adapters tend to be a slower.

Good point. I think IDE->CF adaptors are passive, unpowered and pretty simple adaptors electrically at least. While it's true that modern CF cards are advertised as supporting faster speeds than the latest SD cards in my experience, you won't be getting those speeds using FastIDE/ATA-2 which I think tops out at 16.5MB/s. If your SD card adaptor only supported the original v1.0 bus, that would top out at 12.5MB/s, but if it supports SDHC properly, can clock up to 25MB/s, and then there are the UHS speeds getting even faster. It may well be that accessing that microSD card in your Vampire board is a little quicker than your CF card installed via an adaptor at least for reads, but all modern microSD cards are likely to be MLCed up the wazoo, recording multiple bits on one element of storage using different voltage levels. Your modern high-capacity CF card is likely using similar techniques and is unlikely to be SLC in this day and age, but not quite to the same extreme levels as a microSD card of similar capacity, simply because of the available physical space.

 

[Ian J]

 

[levi]

For anyone else watching that embedded, this video description by user Jim Sachs attached to that video might clarify what the hell it is:

I think this was the last demo of my 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game proposal to Disney. Would have been early '90s. This was made from a very poor 20-year-old VHS tape - possibly the only one in existance, unless Disney kept theirs. It was all done on the Amiga with primitive tools. This was all 2D, but within a few years 3D revolutionized the game industry, so I probably would have had to start over on the project.

I doubt much of that could be done in real time using late 80s spec stuff, but I guess with some high-end video equipment you could probably record it frame by frame. Maybe some of the later stuff that actually looks a bit more like gameplay stuff could be closer to real time though.

 

[TrashyMG]

For anyone else watching that embedded, this video description by user Jim Sachs attached to that video might clarify what the hell it is:


I doubt much of that could be done in real time using late 80s spec stuff, but I guess with some high-end video equipment you could probably record it frame by frame. Maybe some of the later stuff that actually looks a bit more like gameplay stuff could be closer to real time though.

Honestly I think it could have, but it likely would have targeted the AGA flavors of Amiga like the A1200, A3000/4000, CD32