Vamprire 4 Stand Alone

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 4 SA

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

• comes with ApolloOS (customized AROS - AROS research operating system http://www.aros.org/)
• Open Source: AROS Public License, based on MPL https://aros.sourceforge.net/license.html
• API and ABI compatible with classic m68k AmigaOS

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

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

• Nice C-Compiler http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/
  • ISO C according to ISO/IEC 9899:1989 and a subset of the new standard ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (C99).
  • supports Amiga (AmigaOS, MorphOS) and Atari (TOS, MiNT, Jaguar).
  • comes with vlink http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vlink/
  • comes with vasm http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/

Developer Tools - Assembler

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

Developer Tools - Basic

• AMOSPro
• AmigaBlitz https://www.amiblitz.de/
• PureBasic https://www.purebasic.com/

AMOSPro Basic

Development Tools - Editors

• VIM (MUI) - AmigaOS/AROS/ApolloOS is VIM land
• Annotate https://www.onyxsoft.se/annotate.html
• REdit
• ED (AmigaOS default editor)

VIM

Development Tools - Others

• FreePascal https://freepascal.org
• Lua (AmiLua)
• MUIBuilder (MUI Interface builder)
• (Regina) REXX (of course)

FreePascal

MUIBuilder

Lua

Emulators

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

PCTask

PCTask

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