Vamprire 4 Stand Alone

(my first week with an Amiga-ish Computer)

Carsten Strotmann

Created: 2020-12-18 Fri 12:57

the Vampire 4 Stand Alone

What is the Vampire 4 SA?

  • a new Amiga-ish Computer from Apollo Accellerators
  • custom 68080 CPU in FPGA (Altera Cyclone V, Equivalent to 1000MHz 68030 / 500MHz 68040 / 250MHz 68060)
  • 512 MB DDR3 RAM
  • SAGA Graphics (Modes up to 1280×720@60Hz, 1920×1080@24Hz, Color depths of 8, 15/16, 24, 32 bits per pixel)

Vampire 4 SA

Vampire-Setup.jpg

Vampire 4 SA

Vampire-Setup2.jpg

What is the Vampire 4 SA?

  • IDE/CF Card
  • SD-Card Slot
  • HDMI
  • Ethernet (100Mbit)
  • USB (Keyboard/Mouse/Joystick/Joypad)
  • Amiga Joystick Ports (DB9 style)
  • Power via Mini-B USB

Main Operating System

Alternative operating systems

  • Modern AmigaOS
  • EmuTOS (Atari ST)
  • MiNT (Atari ST)

V4SA can be picky

  • power supply - use the one that comes with the machine
  • keyboard - I use a Vortex TAB75 https://candykeys.com/product/vortex-tab75
  • mouse - I had luck with a Lenovo USB mouse
  • USB ports: keyboard must be in the rear USB port, mouse must be in lower front USB port
  • HDMI: works fine even with my wide screen LG monitor in 1280×720@60Hz with 24bit color

First impression

Desktop looks great

  • nice prepackaged and preconfigured system
  • Network (TCP/IP) was disabled, but enabling on startup was a breeze
  • a lot of "Batteries" included
    • Tools and applications (AWeb and IBrowse)
    • Games
    • Demos

Browsers

Vampire-Browser.jpg

Developer Tools - gcc

  • ADE - Amiga Development Environment (GeekGadgets)
    • Unix-Environment for AmigaOS (https://github.com/bebbo/ixemul)
    • translates Syscalls, a BSD kernel running inside AmigaOS/AROS/ApolloOS
    • comes with gcc 2.95.3
    • m68k binutils
    • common Posix tools (ksh, awk, perl, sed …)

Developer Tools - vbcc

Developer Tools - Assembler

  • ASMone Assembler (m68k, PPC)
  • DevPac Assembler
  • vasm

Developer Tools - Basic

AMOSPro Basic

Vampire-AMOSPro.jpg

Development Tools - Editors

VIM

Vampire-VIM.jpg

Development Tools - Others

FreePascal

Vampire-FPC.jpg

MUIBuilder

Vampire-MUI-Builder.jpg

Lua

Vampire-AmiLUA.jpg

Emulators

  • PCTask4 (PC Emulator)
  • AMIMSX (MSX)
  • Stella (Atari 2600)
  • MAME
  • GNGeo (NeoGeo)
  • ScummVM

PCTask

Vampire-PCTask-Setting.jpg

PCTask

Vampire-PCTask-MSDOS.jpg

Issues in the first week

the "make" shutdown

  • ADE GNU make - shuts down machine (WTF??)
    • very annoying
    • downloaded a different "make" port from AmiNet - works

GCC instabilities

  • after compiling 2-3 source files, gcc "crashes" in VFORK() with an illegal stack frame
    • either a AROS, IXEMUL or gcc issue
    • current workaround: "suspend" crashed task, restart "make" in another shell process

Free-Pascal date issue

  • compiling even simple programms ("Hello World") stopps with "Error: 1980-0-0 is not a valid date specification"
    • possibly an issue between ApolloOS and FPC

Whats missing

  • IPv6 Networking
  • Real Time Clock - available as an I2C add-on for ~ 3 Euro
  • stable GCC environment
  • Emacs (some wort of)
  • Modula2/Oberon
  • Forth

Vampire 4 SA final thought after one week

  • great system
  • lots of fun
  • fast enough for most tasks
  • small teething issues - but team and community are responsive

Questions? Discussion!

@cstrotm@mastodon.social

http://m68k.info