New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017

Robert

Robert

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Apollo Accelerators to let FPGA-powered 'Vampire V4' see the light of day

The world's getting a new Amiga for Christmas.

Yes, that Amiga – the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996.

The Amiga was beloved by gamers, graphics pros and many an IT aficionado who just appreciated their speedy (for their time) Motorola 680x0 CPUs, multi-threading operating system and ability to work with images, sound and video.

The platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, but enthusiasm for the Amiga persisted and various clones and efforts to preserve AmigaOS continue to this day.

One such effort, from Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas.

Apollo's produced similar devices before, but says the V4 should outpace its older models thanks to its use of an Altera Cyclone V A5 FPGA to fill the role once played by Motorola silicon. There's also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage. Micro USB gets power to the board. Full specs can be had here [PDF].

Apollo hasn't set a price for the Vampire, but warns it will exceed that of previous models due to more expensive components. The company plans to make accelerator boards first, then get around the standalone systems. ®
Click to expand...
 
My first thought was immediately "cool", but I guess my first question would have to be... "why"?

Aside from tinker with it, what would you do with this presumably expensive toy?

Wayne
 
While I find it mildly interesting, "New Amiga" term everyone keeps repeating is laughable. The Apollo team does not have a license to the brand name, and FPGA recreations of the Amiga have been around 10+ years. Heck, I bought one about 4 years ago in my Turbo Chameleon. Jens does not call his Turbo Chameleon a "New Amiga", nor do most people promoting/using the Minimig hardware nor Mist, FPGA Arcade etc, etc, etc.
 
Well, I guess my problem here is the same as it's been for a decade. The same problem that got me essentially booted from the inner circle way back when...

Hardware doesn't matter....

You could build a 10 ThZ, multi-CPU box with a terabyte of RAM and it'd be completely useless without a usable operating system... AmigaOS and all of the current variants and wannabes are completely useless in the digital age.

Indeed, and I'm never humble in my opinions, if "the Amiga" wants to continue, they need to do the same thing they needed a decade ago, and that's to "pull an Apple"..
  1. pick a core, established OS (like FreeBSD or whatever),
  2. establish whatever the core values of AmigaOS were originally (small, light, etc), and
  3. recreate an operating system from the ground up as something completely new, but saving as much of "the original" look/feel/etc as possible.
  4. Make sure it all runs on commodity hardware and is adaptable to anything and everything that might come in the future...
Until that's done and people can fire up hardware, and use it right out of the box for EVERYTHING AND MORE that people do today, "new" antiquated hardware is virtually irrelevant... Apple gets it. Hell, even Microsoft is doing their best to get it.

Wayne
 
Wayne said:
Well, I guess my problem here is the same as it's been for a decade. The same problem that got me essentially booted from the inner circle way back when...

Hardware doesn't matter....

You could build a 10 ThZ, multi-CPU box with a terabyte of RAM and it'd be completely useless without a usable operating system... AmigaOS and all of the current variants and wannabes are completely useless in the digital age.

Indeed, and I'm never humble in my opinions, if "the Amiga" wants to continue, they need to do the same thing they needed a decade ago, and that's to "pull an Apple"..
  1. pick a core, established OS (like FreeBSD or whatever),
  2. establish whatever the core values of AmigaOS were originally (small, light, etc), and
  3. recreate an operating system from the ground up as something completely new, but saving as much of "the original" look/feel/etc as possible.
  4. Make sure it all runs on commodity hardware and is adaptable to anything and everything that might come in the future...
Until that's done and people can fire up hardware, and use it right out of the box for EVERYTHING AND MORE that people do today, "new" antiquated hardware is virtually irrelevant... Apple gets it. Hell, even Microsoft is doing their best to get it.

Wayne
Click to expand...

Except for some very delusional OS4 users, no one with an interest in Amiga and Amiga-like products/solutions in 2017 think Amiga is going to come back and take over the world. It is just a way to play old games, capture some nostalgia, or just run for general computing as a hobby.

Personally I have very little to no interest in "Amiga" these days beyond playing the odd game here or there in WinUAE or on my Turbo Chameleon. OTOH I have a quite a bit of of retro hardware, mostly C= 8bit. I have no thoughts that retro tech will become relevant again above hobby level stuff, but it is fun. One example would be a brand new game for the C64 about to come out that has possiblly the best gfx I've ever seen on a C64 platformer.

http://www.knightsofbytes.games/sams-journey

I get tired of just another FPS on the PC, so i do more gaming these days on the C=.
 
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