Amiga Thread.

[ClockworkCoder]

Agree re sourcing the chip. Dan Wood, at the end of the video, said he'd help people find a reputable source for one (he has a lot of contacts in the community), but as you say, I guess it would be rather expensive...

 

[TrashyMG]

I should now have all the individual components now to start assembling, just need to clean my mess of a workbench before I even attempt to un-bag and sort all this.

 

[TrashyMG]

If your curious, here is the Bill of Material list...
Edit: oh odd the forum embeds google sheets now...

 

[ClockworkCoder]

Nice! Hope it all goes well

 

[rSl]

with these nice ingredients, it will get yummy. i'm sure.
is it hard to get the amiga custom chips these days?

 

[TrashyMG]

with these nice ingredients, it will get yummy. i'm sure.
is it hard to get the amiga custom chips these days?

I have a badly Battery corroded A2000 Motherboard that is functional but needed heavy repairs to get working and a junk A500 board that I suspect has some DRAM issues i can steal the chips from. But yeah it's likely something that will get harder and harder to source.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

Recently my Bifrost Heimdall edition turned up, and it's... entirely pointless, but awesome!

Basically it's a replacement for the LEDs, and there are switches on the LEDs to customise them a lot - anything from basic colours, colour animations (cycling through rainbow of colours, separate left / right LED colours, and 4 banks of colour settings. There are also add-ons to optionally support PCMCIA activity and for the pre-order kit I also got a caps-lock LED module.

The kit is really nicely thought out IMHO. There are also separate LED diffusers for different case types, and if you want the diffuser to stick out slightly so the buttons are easily accessible. Oh, and there's a 3D printed bleed blocker which blocks light bleed between the LEDs.

By default the colours are similar to the original Amiga's, but to be frank, they look so much nicer!

The Bifrost Project - Manuals

manuals.thebifrostproject.com

 

[pmprog]

 

[ClockworkCoder]

What benefit does this have over the MiST or MISTer?

I guess an internal CF socket, and perhaps it's faster...

 

[pmprog]

AFAIK, MiST(er) are just implementations of the regular A500, whereas the Vampire is combined reimplmentation with accerator card, so higher clock speeds, more memory, upgraded graphics chipset

I might be totally wrong though

 

[TrashyMG]

The Vampire's FPGA core is light years ahead in Amiga performance, but it doesn't support running anything outside of what the Vampire/Apollo Team provides.

 

[samuraicrow]

The Vampire standalone has a smaller FPGA than the MISTer and the Vampire v4 is hitting the limits of what will fit.

 

[TrashyMG]

The Vampire standalone has a smaller FPGA than the MISTer and the Vampire v4 is hitting the limits of what will fit.

The V2 used in Vampire Accelerator' which use the Cyclone III are hitting a limit of what it can do, the V4 has never been stated it's hitting any limit as of yet and I'm following the project fairly well... This is isn't surprising as The Vampire V4 is using the same series of Cyclone V as the MISTER although not exactly the same, think the difference is only like 20 flops or something.
However that said the Amiga FPGA core the MISTer is using is extremely slow compared to the Vampire V4. But there is still some benefits to the MISTer, for one it has better HDMI scaling as it's doing it with external circuitry and it has an ARM computer to offfload some tasks, where as the Vampire is doing it all in the FPGA core. The MISTer will also be better for people that just want to play Legacy games, where the Vampire is more tuned to people that want to push into 68k Amiga unseen territories as the 68080 core has modern processor features and extensions and is pushing new software development. Most people just want a nostalgia ride, so the MISTer is fine for that.

 

[pmprog]

What's the Amiga ecosystem like these days? With the Vampire having ethernet, is there a port of Firefox or some other modern web browser? What are the choices for email clients?
What are development options these days? Both for games and desktop GUI applications?

 

[TrashyMG]

What's the Amiga ecosystem like these days? With the Vampire having ethernet, is there a port of Firefox or some other modern web browser? What are the choices for email clients?
What are development options these days? Both for games and desktop GUI applications?

Well there is Netsurf, Firefox is a bit too bloated still, although the V4 does have 512MB of SDRAM so that may help compared to my Vampire with only 128. Honestly I use TwinVNC client to my Linux box if I need a browser... there are a slew of email clients, just don't use them on my Amiga.

There are a few cross-compiler environments, I like: https://github.com/bebbo/amiga-gcc although I don't know much about gui programming. MUI is well documented though. You can of course compile on the amiga, but I find GCC versions are considerable outdated, and of course speed is an issue.

 

[kuru]

 

[Stainy]

First beta of Pimiga 2.0 ( based on 3.9 ) should drop tomorrow for beta testers 1.5 runs nice on my pi400

 

[TrashyMG]

Hmm I'd expect it to be faster than the Vampire, but still likely more obtainable and cheaper and it's good enough for most things Amiga.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

I'm not sure how I feel about PiStorm. Don't get me wrong, it's really cool, but there seems something a little wrong to me using emulation within a real Amiga.

 

[levi]

Reminds me of the piTube interface for the BBC Micro. Allows you to plug in a raspberry pi zero into where back in the '80s your plug in a second processor. That can be made to emulate a 6502 second processor, or a Z80, or even an ARM (in the latter case it's not actually emulating anything)